


Impiety

by cirque_de_reves (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anal Sex, Blowjobs, Castiel Winchester - Freeform, Destiel - Freeform, Destiel Fluff, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Mentions of Underage Sex, Sexual Tension, Slutty Whitney, Smut, Top!Cas, Tragedy, What is and what should never be, Wing Kink, bottom!Dean, can you believe they invented love, destiel smut, djinn, far from a slow burn, not a slow burn friends, s2ep20
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 10:39:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11011767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cirque_de_reves
Summary: His hair is made up of a thousand golden filaments, and his eyes are fresh and gleaming with harsh adrenaline, the color of shimmering poplar leaves in summer; like the rolling hills of grass growing up to your knees that makes you feel free and extraordinary; like the strong, winding stems of flowers, sprouting miraculously through cracks in the pavement. The greenest green.He is tall, and built broadly and for things bigger than himself, and his name is Dean Winchester.Cas doesn't know what he wants until he has it; which is ironic, because it's not real.





	Impiety

**Author's Note:**

> first off, thanks to @kimbobhop for editing this with me! she was so supportive thanks girl <3  
> This is the first time I've ever written anything this long (and been satisfied with it) so I'm super excited for y'all to see it! I hope you enjoy! I spent hella time on this you guys!
> 
> also, comments make me very very happy :))
> 
> have fun!! :3

Castiel wakes up in the bowels of the sewer. 

He finds himself in a big, open room; like a great hall, almost, but bare enough as to leave everything to the imagination. 

His eyes swim across the walls and ceilings, which are fashioned in a sort of circular and compromised dichotomy of thin steel piping and concrete. Water pools across his ankles; they're swollen. He wonders how long he has been here, how long he has slept for. 

His wrists are tied together behind him, in a creaking and uneven wooden chair from a time before this, one with certainly improper ideas about furniture-making, for one thing. 

He is at the very center of the hollow edifice, and when he wrings the rope about his hands he can practically hear it echo, loosely, echo with a sort of disconnected eeriness Castiel is sure he will find only in isolation. 

Wardings riddle the patchwork structure around him, and some of them he recognizes, some he doesn't. Some he knows to be angel wardings, which means that his captor has either taken his grace or has lost it, incidentally, somewhere along the line, which is unlikely, for one thing, and futile thinking that will get him nowhere. 

Cas feels like a bird in a cage. 

Although, of course, a bird has its wings, which is something Castiel does not appear to have maintained. 

He flexes his fingers behind the damp cord that threads them together, and tries not to panic. 

Dean had said, had  _ said _ that Cas would be helpless without his grace. 

And look, here he is, definitively helpless and with nowhere to turn to, given the room is round and panoramically monochromatic, and with no apparent exits, judging from the amount of time Cas has spent looking. 

There are, however, little shafts leading upwards and depositing dark, soup-like sewer sludge that makes Cas's (now very human) hair stand on end. 

He is hungry, and fatigued, and claustrophobically enclosed in a large room with no windows and consequently, no light at all, that seems to have him at least sixty feet underground. The ceiling itself looks almost that high. 

_ Everything here is contaminated _ , he thinks. Even the moisture in the air seems to be struck with poison and painted with electricity. 

Of course, the lack of such sterile things only leads to the daydreaming of them, like food, and water. 

The urgency of thirst makes his mouth fill with saliva and his eyes dry, as if he had sucked all the moisture from them into his tongue, and suddenly, he is very hyper-aware of all his senses. There is the wicked sewerage again, sloshing around in his shoes and seeping through their leather again to rejoin its swirling body, suspiciously inanimate and yet somehow constantly cresting and foaming in maniacal waves behind his eyelids when he blinks, mocking him with its mobility, heaving up against the warding-paint reddened walls and corroding them evilly, in such a way Cas feels as if he can see it happen and feel it happening to him, too; and there is the hard and grainy surface of the strangely dry chair beneath him, wobbling and teetering on the edge of tumbling straight into the massive, hell-bound whirlpool frothing around him; and the horrible rope that holds him there, that has touched his captor's hands and now touches his, making him feel small and violated and terrified. 

He struggles uselessly against it, tries his tiny humanoid strength against the simple ropes that bind him, but it does nothing and he is only left in uncomfortable anticipation, lips hypothermia-blue and waiting, restlessly, for the terrible sewage liquid to consume him seamlessly and swallow him and keep him there, to atrophy into a piece of its malefic oneness. 

He feels everything; he wonders how he had ever slept so soundly, sitting here so vulnerable and caged. 

Castiel feels little to no hope. Even if the Winchesters could save him, there is no way they would find him here, without his grace, where he himself doesn't even know where the hell he is.

And maybe, this is deserved of him. 

Maybe the universe had swept him in here like dirt, shutting the door, swallowing the key and walking away, never wanting to concern itself with Castiel again, because he deserves it. 

Maybe it wants him to soak up his sins here, for lack of sun. Wants him to, inevitably, crave death. 

As punishment, maybe. 

The thought is such a relief that his head rolls back, and his muscles no longer seem  quite  as tense, and he feels the inevitability of it roll back into the spaces behind his eyes and his very soul, almost. 

This is his penance to the world. He is to wait out his sins in this cold, dark hellhole, left alone with his disgust for himself. 

This is more, far more, than he could have asked for. 

Cas feels alleviated; he sighs. It feels good. It feels…final. 

It would have been easier to die, but this, this is what he deserves. And that’s okay. 

Panic begins to recharge his veins, and he lets it. Lets it take control of his brain and body. Pain is nothing without fear, and doesn't he want the pain? To erupt inside him and erode his guilt, wash it away with deliverance?

To turn him around to face eternity, in the belly of the beast, incarcerated in his own transgression. 

"Finally," a voice, a strange one, sounding unlike any Castiel has ever heard, cold and confident and discharged – echoes around the cavernous pit, lacking empathy and faking pity, with grand arrogance and at the same time, no emphasis at all. 

This must be his captor. This is the one who has stolen his grace and everything he has. 

This is the one he is to swear his sincerest gratitude to, for this peculiarly mollifying torture. 

It speaks again, softly this time. 

"You are sufficiently relaxed, I can see that. That was much faster than I had expected, I'll admit. You must have something truly jaw-dropping locked up in that head of yours." A figure emerges out of what seems like thin air to accompany the voice, and it is just as strange. 

It is tall and thin, willowy even, with dark indigo hair as long as itself, and fiery blue swirls contorting under its skin in the place of veins and arteries. Everything about it is long: long neck, long hair, long face, long limbs and fingers that look like they could grab Castiel from here. It is menacing and somehow beautiful, in a way, in a terribly unconventional, ghastly way that sends cancerous shadows up Cas’s spine to make him shiver violently.

The creature laughs, throwing its head back in amusement. "Do I really scare you that much? With the scent coming off you, you seem like anything that would scare you, you'd be happy to see." It scratches at the base of its throat, where its flesh dips sickly down into its body, so deep Castiel can't see an end to it. 

"What do you mean?" Cas says, spitting the trembling words out of his gullet as if they are blades, managing somehow to staunch the tremors this time as they crawl up his neck. 

"I mean, you're as guilty as I've ever seen anyone," the thing coos, caressing Cas's face, and if Cas was unable to move before, now he is paralyzed. "You're so ashamed of yourself, I can taste it on your skin." It pulls its hand away as if shocked, and licks its fingertips, practically moaning. "I usually have to dig pretty deep to get to the good stuff, but you, my dear, have brought it straight to the surface." It chuckles, and Castiel tenses. So this is about guilt, if in a way he could never have anticipated. 

"I don't – I don't understand-" Cas mutters, eyes wide and tongue numb and incompetent. 

"Lovely," it says, with a grim sort of smile, not using its eyes at all, "I'll tell you, but if you don't get it then, I might just have to show you." It flashes its teeth in another grin, trailing its spidery fingers along Castiel's collarbone and straddling him, hooking its legs around his hips. Up close, it is grotesquely ethereal. "Rose here, I'm a djinn, and I feed on your guilt. And believe me, sweetheart, there's a shit ton of it on you." 

So  _ this _ is a monster in its natural habitat, female, by the name, Cas thinks. One that drains his fluids and eats the guilt out of them while he sleeps away in some dreamy world that doesn't exist, wasting forever in the few minutes it would take for his life to fall away into the stomach of this aberration. 

"I thought your –  _ kind _ – fed on fear." Castiel stutters, squirming. 

"Oh, that too," she says. "Some of us have simply developed...different tastes." She flicks her hair back with a long and dirty fingernail, analyzing his eyes with her own, with a certain hunger that pierces his skull like a blunt needle; cracking it into pieces and licking them up with nothing but her dilated pupils and deep purple irises. "I can't believe it, really. You, you're hardly human, you're so full of shame. I mean, I get that you haven't exactly had much practice, what with the whole fallen-angel deal, but good lord, what did you  _ do _ ?" She asks curiously, purple eyes sparkling with an insane thirst Castiel recognizes. 

"It doesn't matter." Cas gulps down the vomit of his sins, refusing to give himself in to this primitive creature with the hunger and the way of making him feel worse than ever for what he's done. 

"You're right, of course," she presses a fingertip to the corner of his mouth. "What matters is how you feel about it. And darling, you feel like the worst of criminals, don't you?" He expects her to pout mockingly, there, but instead she looks almost interested; and somehow that hurts more, like a dull ache in his diaphragm, and now he can't breathe. 

He takes a deep breath, looks down, away from her harshly inquiring eyes. 

"Can you make it go away?" He asks, genuinely, quietly, the voice of a man who can't handle any more than he already has. 

"Oh, love," she says, tilting his chin up and studying his face, like she is about to improve it. "I can make you forget why you ever felt it in the first place." 

He closes his eyes, and she touches his forehead, and everything disappears. 

 

***

 

Castiel yawns, loudly and nonchalantly. 

It's been said that the most innocent hours of the day are when one first wakes up, and the same could be said of him, he thinks. He hasn't slept, not for real, in so long. Even as an angel, he knows it would've been cathartic. 

There's a digital clock beside the bed, and he reads that it's late evening, but he figures he has all the time he needs. 

His hands sweep across the bedspread blindly. He is in a bed, obviously, a large one, empty but for himself. It's so soft. 

He buries his head in the smooth and diffused delicacy of the mattress under him; doesn't want to get up, or figure out where he is like he should. 

And in a split second, it all comes back: a rush of blood to his head, carrying the knowledge of why he is where he is, and how, and now he knows again, it's because of his remorse, that brought him here; because the djinn wanted some of it for herself, and numbed him from it with this, and what is he supposed to do now?

...He is supposed to forget. 

Castiel pushes himself up on his hands and raises his head to the ceiling, inhaling deeply and accepting this weird fate. What a strange, and almost pleasant, way of going. 

He's glad this is how it will end.

He plants his feet on the floor next to the bed and rubs his eyes sleepily, brushing off his clothes. He's not wearing what he was; rather, a soft cotton shirt that's much too big for him, a deep purple shade, like the color of the djinn's eyes. 

But that's all he's wearing, so he fishes through the sheets until he finds a pair of under-shorts that seem to fit him, and steps outside of the bedroom, into a lighter world than the last. 

As soon as Cas stumbles through the ornate eggshell doorframe, it's like he's giddy, like he's just drunk something alcoholic and spun around into dizziness. Because there is Dean, in front of him, on the phone with someone and wearing the same thing Cas is except not, because he doesn't have a shirt on, and wow, and okay-maybe-he-will-stay-here. 

Cas stands there in awe, and his attempt to convince himself that this Dean is not the real Dean is cancelled out entirely, because he's too preoccupied with the beautiful sweeping back muscles and the places where his wings would be, if he had them. 

And it's as if Dean senses him then (which, Castiel doesn't fail to notice, is something he would have been able to do, if he had still had his grace; and that's another thing, why doesn't he) because Dean turns around, and that's when Castiel understands. 

He understands that Dean is what he wished for. 

That's why he's not an angel, here. His mind was so full of a desire for this, and this is something else. 

Even subconsciously, this is what he wanted, what he still wants and now has. 

It's so goddamn fulfilling. 

"Cas? Why're you looking at me like that?" Dean says, shaking him out of his stupor. 

This probably means he'd be able to touch Dean whenever now, that's so wonderful. The mere thought of it makes him jitter with adrenaline. 

"What?" Cas shakes his head and his sleep-worn hair flies around him in a ruffled flurry, a little bit, and it's so easy to be blinded by the lovely man in front of him. 

Cas goes out on a limb, touches his face. Actually sweeps the back of his hand down his jawline, but call it what you wish. 

"Cas," Dean says again, worriedly, and Cas can't get enough of it, "what're you doing, baby? Why're you lookin' at me like that, sweetheart, you're kind of freakin' me out, here-" 

And Castiel is kissing him, because he's just waited so long, and now he can! ...And then he just melts into it. 

He has, after all, experience. Pizza men can be, he has learned, of the utmost convenience. 

Dean's lips are dry and plump, so Castiel wets them with his tongue, and Dean responds so well –  with the running his hands through Cas's hair and fisting it as if he's trying to hold back, and why, Cas doesn't know, he wants it all – and there's Castiel's hands on Dean's neck, finding support in the tight, strong tendons there, and Dean's healthy, muscled arms wrapped around him and making him feel safe, he's home, he's here. His heart palpitates, throws itself against Dean's chest in an effort to get closer to him, to get them so close they're indistinguishable, they're one. 

It's Dean that breaks away first, without opening his eyes. He brings two fingers to his lips and grazes them lightly with his fingertips, eyes still shut tight, and Cas allows himself a little pride, knowing he's done this to him. 

"Dammit, Cas," he says, using a phrase Cas knows so well, and is so glad to hear used in this context like this. It's a moment, then, before Dean regains his footing and shakes off the bliss. "Easy there, tiger, Sammy's on the phone." 

He laughs, a gorgeous, pure thing, like pennies falling to the bottom of a fountain, like the granting of a wish. 

"Is he?" Castiel answers gutturally, still a bit drowsy from that amazing kiss, that deliciously overwhelming one. "I think he's probably hung up by now." He says, not the least bit ashamed, because Sam hasn't been yearning for this forever, has he, hasn't been waiting for this like schoolchildren wait for spring. 

Dean looks at him then, stares at him with lust-blown pupils and long lashes and a half-smile that makes everything Castiel has ever done for him so worthwhile. 

There's a second there when Dean looks like he'll reach out and touch Cas again, and his eyes will dull in a moment and his hands will drop stiffly to his sides, Cas is sure, this is about the time when they usually would, isn't it?  

But then, they don't – they still reach out and rub circles on his back, and it's so climactic, so much so, it makes up for every time Dean has almost done this, has leaned into Cas until he was a millimeter from his lips and then backed away and acted like nothing had ever happened, like their lungs hadn't shared the same warm breath and like Cas couldn't almost feel Dean's rough stubble against his own flushed skin - because, Dean's lips are on his again, and they spin away into the allure of each other's bodies and Cas can feel the sheer power of this spectacular and finally acknowledged tension between them, he can taste how in love he is and how Dean is with him and it kind of makes him love himself, and it's the best he has felt in so long. 

And it's then that he decides to really stay, here in Dean's arms, with a djinn twirling his life's thread on her fingers somewhere; but not without reason, because this is a reason to live and a reason to die and gives reason to everything, and it feels so real, he just wants to believe that it is. 

He thinks maybe he could if he just let himself, so he does: he dissolves into Dean's lean muscle and soft skin and hair like sunshine; he lets himself get soaked into this beautiful man as he rocks him back and forth, feels every inch of that skin against his own, rubbing and grinding and chafing against Cas's own soul in a whirl of intimacy and stimuli and sex and love and both of them, together. 

And when it's finally all too much, and Dean has brought him to the edge of euphoria and wants to jump off with him, he sails right over the cliff, moaning and exploding into stars. 

 

***

 

When Castiel wakes up for the second time, it's morning, and the sheets are dirty and crumpled around him. He is feels comfortable. 

The only thing that gets him up is the smell of coffee, which was an acquired taste as a human but one he has learned to enjoy; so he follows the aroma clumsily through the breaking dawn. The dim, rose-colored lighting makes him giddy. Everything in his frame of vision has only an outline and nothing else, but that's okay, because he has Dean memorized. 

"'Morning, babe." Dean says through a mouthful of something and a fistful of newspaper, shrugging into his coat and wiggling his shoes on. For half a second, the sight of something so astoundingly normal makes Cas almost uneasy - but then, just grateful. 

"Good morning, love." Cas responds. He can't help it, it just slips out, it feels natural. 

Dean blushes like a schoolgirl.

"Listen, I can't stay long - I have a nine o'clock, and these people don't appreciate lateness, even if it's for a really good reason." He looks at Cas suggestively, with raised eyebrows and a small smile, before kissing him gently on the mouth. Cas has kissed those lips already so many times since he knew he could, and yet, he's still surprised by the simple, shy romance of it. 

"What? Why?" Cas says. He knows how stupid he sounds, and that it doesn't really matter, because this Dean will forgive him for it. 

"Why?" Dean says, and giggles teasingly, but it looks a bit like adoration, and the feeling is mutual. "Cas, I'm a therapist. I wouldn't get paid if these guys didn't have problems," he grabs a shiny car key off the pale blue counter next to him, and shrugs, his whole body rippling with the movement. "Speaking of, why aren't you dressed yet? There's only one car, and we both have jobs." He says, running a bulky hand through Cas's sexed-up hair and making him shudder with sighing pleasure. 

"Oh, of course, I- uh, I forgot. What should I wear?" Cas replies in fragments of fractured speech. For some reason, it's the first question he thinks to ask. 

Dean chuckles somewhat tiredly, but it's a good kind of tired, like he's satisfied. "Damn, Cas, you're not that gay, are you?" And the familiarity of it is so striking that Cas wants to laugh with real tears, because that's exactly something Dean would say, and he's almost forgotten that none of it is real. 

Almost, but not quite. 

"No, I suppose not." Cas says, but he's slurring his words like a pacifist drunkard – but with a comfortable kind of laziness, like dependence, and it feels incredible and fresh. He gets one last good look at Dean before he heads back into the bedroom to continue his exploration of this most wonderful gift, this novelty safe-haven, this warm discovery. 

 

***

 

Cas stands, staring at the car. 

It is not a 1967 Chevy Impala. 

It is far from it. 

Seeing Dean in a different car is like seeing a different Dean, although maybe that's realistic, he supposes. 

But, a minivan is not realistic. 

"What's wrong, babe?" Dean calls from inside the foreign vehicle. Obviously, he is not addressing the car, because that is a name reserved only for a certain, otherworldly Impala and now, him. His thoughts itch, because if he was still an angel, he could revert this extraterrestrial thing in a single moment. 

...He and the car have both fallen from grace.  

He pats the roof of the poor thing, and gets in. He almost wants to say a few words, but the car would not know what he means. Even if it was the impala, it would not know. It is a car, he remembers, and he is being ridiculously sentimental. He plants his feet on the cluttered floor; rather reluctantly, though. He has seen much better (but he won't tell the car that). 

"Cas?" Dean says again, and Cas is shaken from his state of disarray, and into faltering disbelief. He squints a little bit and makes a face at the dashboard. 

_ We will resume this later _ , he thinks at the car.  _ This is not over _ .  

"Yes, let's go." Cas replies, watching Dean turn the keys, focused and precise. Even thinking, for him, is sexy. 

"The impala's with Sammy," Dean says, eyes concentrated on the road in an iron, unblinking glare with a kind of just-woke-up-after-sex-with-my-celestial-boyfriend badass that Castiel really admires. He sighs almost inaudibly, in relief, knowing that there is still an impala, and that it is still preferable over this. (Sorry, he thinks, at the car again.) "You looked a little out of it there. I know, I'm not happy about it either, but my brother needs to learn to take care of something before Jess has that baby." He finishes, a smile beaming across his whole face with pride. He turns his head to Cas, looking for gratification, the corners of his mouth creased with happy wrinkles, dimples shining. Cas grins deeply, because that means Sam is content here too; and he pats his hand tenderly over Dean's free one, keeping it there lightly, almost trembling with the energy of it. Dean doesn't even look down, which is so nice, because it means he's comfortable with it – it means he approves. 

"So, tell me about your job." Cas says. He wants to know everything. He wants so badly to fit in here. 

"Really?"

"Yes, Dean, of course."

"You've never really been interested in my job." He says smartly, and almost accusingly. "What happened to 'we both need a little of our own lives', Cas?" He says, smirking and never taking his eyes off the chilly morning road. 

"Oh. I just think...if we're going to have this big a portion of our lives remain separate, it can't hurt to at least know what you're doing today. Besides, it's- intriguing. All that office gossip." He says, completely ad-libbing and trying to sound rational at the same time, and it doesn't have the same nuance as usual but he still has a lot to learn here. 

"Okay, well, today I have my first family coming in." Dean says carefully and slowly, like he's talking to a child, but Cas just waits. 

"I wasn't really sure whether it was a good idea to move up from singles therapy, you know, because it's enough as it is, without six of 'em yelling at you all at once, but I figured you know what? Fuck it. There's a raise to it, and God knows we deserve a raise, don't we, Cas, huh?" He slaps Cas's thigh and they're both smiling and he's so happy Dean's happy it almost hurts, like a colossal flower blooming between his ribs. 

"Yes. Yes, we do."  

Dean grins toothily at Cas and turns his head back to the windshield. "Well, it goes both ways then. Why don't you tell me what's going on at that shelter of yours?" But he's pulled the car up at a building, one that Castiel evidently belongs to, and it's a good save. 

“I – I would, but it looks like we're here," he says to Dean, swinging the door open and kicking his legs out, but not before reaching out to cradle Dean's face and kiss his nose. "Tell you what – I'll share all my secrets, as soon as you pick me up today." He kisses him once more, on the mouth this time, and walks confidently across the cobblestones. 

 

***

 

Castiel stands stiffly at the entrance of the place, hands clinging rigidly to his sides in a kind of warped respect. There are torn gray steel block letters arranged across the upper front of the edifice, a bit disheveled and leaning, reading politely the words:

NOVAK'S HOME FOR LOST ANGELS 

and that's ironic and really corny and not particularly inviting, but Cas figures he has to go in. 

He steps, wide-eyed, through the thin double doors. They are glass, and well-polished, leading to a small lobby with maroon carpeting and tan walls and a woman sitting behind a wooden desk with a computer on it along with pens and things, and a name tag behind her says her name: Dr. Rachel Little, Anthropologist and Humanitarian, with little clip-art smiley faces on either side that stare at him expectantly. She looks up and recognition eases across her face, and Cas can see pigments of happiness in the corners other mouth and eyes. 

It feels good to be important to people. 

"Good! Hi, Cas – We've been wondering where you were! C'mere, I want to show you something." She climbs out of the desk chair and gestures towards him, and starts walking down the hallway. Cas makes an honest effort to take it all in - the fading pattern of the wallpaper; the comfortable and fading armchairs that appear along the edges of the vestibule at random intervals; the thriving plants in stained, colorful little pots every so often; and the people that pass by, alone or in groups, looking determined and busy, but not angry or sad, and he decides this place has been here for a very long time. 

It has his last name, and maybe it's his. He's glad he can't remember how he began it, or how it began in general, because the feeling of fitting in and of being accepted so immediately and without question is incredible and new and makes him proud of himself, and that is enough as it is. 

He follows Rachel wordlessly as she continues down the corridor, mind stuffed with bouncing, caffeinated thoughts, and he feels ready for whatever's at the end of the hallway. 

Rachel stops suddenly, in front of an industrial-type-heavy looking door made of the same shiny metal as the letters naming the building it belongs to. Rachel looks at him, suspiciously but with a sort of hopeful anticipation in the lines of her cheekbones, and speaks. 

"Hold on a sec, Cas - I've got to grab something in the kitchen, but you're going to the cafeteria anyways I guess - come with me?" She says, looking nervous, her slender fingers already wrapped around the door's handle. Cas doesn't know her, but he should, and he feels like he does; so he nods, and she opens the door into darkness. 

"That's weird, where is everyone? The lights are off, and-" she reaches toward the switch in a jerky movement of her dimly outlined torso, and flips it upward and on. 

"Surprise!"

Cas jumps at the all-around-ness of it, the chorus; the echoing, ringing excitement of it, and then he can't stop smiling. There are people everywhere, there's even people he knows – Claire, Jody, Sam (looking younger, Cas can tell because his hair is shorter and so is he), even Hannah. And there is Dean. 

Smiling back at him, streamers dangling from his wrists and hair.

He's so beautiful. 

"Happy birthday, baby." Dean says, smoothly, a grin gliding across his face as if Cas was pouring it on, like he's spreading it, like peanut butter. Castiel, for the first time in so long, can hardly contain his joy. 

"Is this okay?" Dean asks after a moment. His hand is on Cas's shoulder and he slides it gently down to Cas's wrist and tenderly intertwines their fingers, loosely, but with a commitment Cas has found, so far, only here. His hair is golden, as usual, and leaking sunlight; and his green eyes are bright and clear as anything, full of love and faith and intention, and his hand is warm in Cas's, radiating satisfaction, tingling and gratifying. 

"Dean, it's perfect." 

Castiel looks around him, at all the people he's supposed to know and appreciate the existence of, and he thinks now that he does; that's they're all worthy of humanity for their own reasons, just because they are. 

And that's it. He's forgotten. It didn't take as much as he thought it would to convince him to switch around his realities – or maybe, he wants it badly enough that it didn't take anything at all. 

His free hand swoops around Dean's waist and holds him there, at the small of his back, tightly and so gratefully, and he flexes his fingers in Dean's and bends their elbows together, closing the distance between them. He looks Dean in the eyes for a second, and they are brimming with beautiful, fluctuating feelings, like birds unfolding their wings and taking flight in his irises. 

Cas bumps his lips against Dean's; cherishing their heated dampness and all the little lines and wrinkles there, and the whiskers that frame his mouth and freckled cheeks, and he breaks away, eyes still closed, while satisfied butterflies flit sleepily to the bottom of his stomach. 

He feels content. 

The people around them are clapping now, bursting into applause. Cas doesn't really understand why, but he doesn't mind the way it fills the silence, and suddenly the linoleum walls are thriving with echoed laughter and chatter and noise. 

He takes both of Dean's hands in his own and kisses him on the cheek, lightly and briefly, but he hopes he's left a bit of his heart there. 

"Thank you, so much, Dean. I love it, all of it, and the people, and the surprise, and you, Dean, you-" he rambles on happily, looking around at his friends. "I really should go talk to some of them, though, offer my thanks to them as well – they're so nice, so beautiful." He slackens his grip on Dean and takes a step toward the (growing, it seems like) crowd, but Dean grabs hold of him again and whips him around. They are so close. 

"Cas,  _ you're _ beautiful." 

He lets Cas go, and walks away toward the Rachel-secretary-woman, leaving Cas buzzing and full and satisfied, striding eagerly towards the first people he sees. 

(Dean is beautiful too, he really is.)

 

***

 

Castiel folds his arms across his chest, cocks his head to the side in a show of interest. 

The man he is talking to, a 55-ish street beggar, is evidently a regular customer here at Cas's shelter, and his life story is a sincere combination of pain, mercy, and rainwater collected in buckets for drinking - and it's so interesting. 

The other Cas, from before, would have never admitted it to himself or anyone, but he has sort of missed being human. Sure, it mandates the strangest normalities, and urinating is no walk in the park, but that's what makes it so worth it - even if that's the only reason Cas kept going - to spite the oddities. Because what came after them, this, this glorious reprise of his doomed future, is surprising (he says, and chuckles, and Cas does love a good pun on circumstance) and makes up for all the sins and travesties in every way he could have imagined and more. 

Castiel gets all this from the few, lisped sentences the homeless man has spoken zealously through a toothy grin, and he can feel the whole of his being stellating with the electricity of inspiration. He feels at peace. 

Until-

Until his eyes catch the man walking through the front door. 

And suddenly, everything comes back. 

His hair is made up of a thousand golden filaments, and his eyes are fresh and gleaming with harsh adrenaline, the color of shimmering poplar leaves in summer; like the rolling hills of grass growing up to your knees that makes you feel free and extraordinary; like the strong, winding stems of flowers, sprouting miraculously through cracks in the pavement. The greenest green. 

He is tall, and built broadly and for things bigger than himself, and his name is Dean Winchester. 

He stands in the doorway and he is real; realer than anyone else in the room, realer even than Cas himself, because Cas has forgotten how good it is to see him, the real him. Somehow, he can tell that he belongs to actuality. He’s less shiny. He’s less  _ satisfying _ .

But, he remembers, this isn't possible; there is another Dean, just a few yards away from him, talking happily with his brother and friends, glancing and smiling at Castiel every once in a while, even winking once. 

Cas feels like throwing up, or better, getting out. 

"I'm sorry, I have to go, there's something – something I have to do. I'm sorry." He says to the homeless man, turning his back to the real Dean that can't be real, because he is a hallucination, isn't he, he has to be - and walking away from him, towards the nearest door, which is at least 10 meters away, through a pulsing sea of fake people. 

He has to get out. Away from Dean. Find someplace to forget again. He is, after all, just seeing things, nothing more. 

"It's alright, Mr. Novak, it was very nice talkin' to ya-" the man plants his palm firmly on Cas's bicep, but Cas tears away, walking as fast as he can towards that door. It's heavy, reinforced steel again, but that's good, a bigger barrier between him and reality. And he's reaching for the handle-

"Cas?"

There is a hand, on his shoulder, and it's warm and feels much better than Castiel expected. Sonorous and full, like home. 

Cas turns around. And his eyes are wide and brimming with tears, and they are now only a few shaky breaths away from the green ones, the bright green eyes he can see all the way through. 

This is not a hallucination. 

"Dean. Are you...are you enjoying the party?" Cas leans, as nonchalantly as he can, against the door. 

"Cas," Dean says, sounding grave, and final. "You know why I'm here, man." His hand slides slowly off of Castiel's shoulder, finding his side and sticking to it fixedly. It's bewildering poor Cas, the fact that two Deans are here at the same time with different feelings towards him, but it could be worse. He can tell them apart; they look at him differently. 

But Cas is distracted, because there is the other Dean, looking straight at him with the same eyes. 

He pushes this Dean out of the way again, and heads towards the other one, and now it is getting confusing, it's getting weird, and uncomfortable, he just wants to stay. 

He walks over, trench coat flowing, and hugs him.  _ This _ Dean can't see it, he thinks, but there are tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, and they're there, all too real, because he really doesn't want to say goodbye, not again, not now. 

"Cas?" And coming from him, it's the exact same voice, too, and it scares him like nothing else has. "Is everything okay?" He rubs his back, and Cas has to hold back a sob. 

"Yes, Dean, of course." He says. But he is really thinking,  _ why can't it ever be _ . 

He can feel the fake Dean open his mouth against his shoulder, but he just kisses it lightly. 

 

***

 

When the real Dean finds Cas again, he is still hugging the djinn's creation. 

Cas opens his eyes, and there are two Deans with him. No one else at the party seems to even notice, but maybe it's just as well. 

"Cas? What's going on?" The real Dean looks at them both in bafflement and repulsion, and it hurts, a lot, but in the other Dean's arms it doesn't hurt as much. They both turn and face him, and Cas holds his hand, tightly. 

The real Dean is shaking his head, sadly now. "Cas, this isn't real." 

"I know." Cas says, but his words are twisted and scratchy, and barely make it out of his throat. 

"You know? Then what are we still doing here? What do we need to do, what's gonna get us out of here?" He stands straight up, looking the other Dean up and down, staring at their intertwined hands. His face dawns in realization, pain roaring through his eyes like fire and making their color deeper, almost, like regret. 

There wasn't supposed to be any regret here. 

"Cas..."

Castiel closes his eyes again, for a moment, and clenches his teeth. He wishes he could have stayed here, oh god, oh lord, he wishes-

"Dean, I – I can't."

Dean won't meet his eyes. They are locked on Cas's hands locked on Dean's, and when he speaks again, his voice is quiet and broken. 

"What are you saying?" 

He still won't look up. 

"Dean, please, I can't leave, I can't-" Cas breaks down into sobs, his voice falling into misery. The other Dean can only stare at them both in confusion. Cas looks away from him, but still clutches his hand like a lifeline. 

"Cas, you have to come. You can't stay here, you have a family, you have us – me and Sam, we're your family. Not these...people, they're not-" the real Dean trails off, gulping, eyes still burning holes in Cas's fingertips. 

Castiel finishes for him, scratchier than he ever thought his voice could even get. 

"They're not you."

The real Dean finally meets his eyes. 

Cas will never really get what he wants, and the guilt will never really go away, but at least he will know that he tried. He remembers the way Dean has just looked at Cas’s hands twisted through his own fake ones before meeting his eyes: with nothing but pity and disgust. He remembers, and he drops his lover's hand quickly, without thinking, in one jerky movement. 

Even if Dean doesn't...doesn't  _ love _ him, he can't do this to him. Can't leave him behind in a world of pain and sadists, can't trust him there. 

"Cas? Are you coming, or not?" The true Dean, the one Cas must consider now, interrupts the pensive silence with those words. The real question. 

"Yes, Dean, of course." He says, painfully, forcedly. The words come out guttural, with an agony he didn't know he could feel. 

Dean pauses, purses his lips. 

Cas imagines Dean doesn't want this anymore than he does. 

"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go, buddy, c'mon, this place is freaking me out." Dean tries to sound casual, but his eyes are fleeting, keep switching from Cas to the one that loves him, and his voice is cracking. 

He finally focuses on Castiel himself, puts his hand on his shoulder again, and it feels more solemn now, somehow. His hand finds the spot between Cas's shoulder blades, and he pushes him there, towards the door. Cas thinks he might be able to make it, he thinks he might, until a strangled voice behind him screams his name. 

"Cas, wait!" 

The other Dean has fallen to his knees in those torn jeans he wears, is reaching out for Cas as he walks away. His body shudders and trembles with each tear that falls across his nose, that dips into his cheekbones and drips from his jawline. 

Cas can't look away. 

"What are you doing? Why are you leaving?" He calls to Castiel, vocal cords thrumming with pure need, absolute anguish. 

Salt water pollutes his long, black lashes, and he can't blink it away, can't call out back to him, because it's like he's paralyzed, it's like someone is squeezing his lungs, compacting and packaging them into the silent tears now weeping out of his eyes.  

The real Dean pats his back awkwardly, in an attempt to console him, maybe, but his look-alike keeps speaking, keeps trying. 

"I thought you were happy!" 

Cas buries his head in the real Dean's shoulder, tries to block out this horrible pain, he can feel it scarring his heart, cutting it open and letting it bleed. Dean holds his head there, takes a step, ushers him the ultimate few feet towards the door. 

"Don't you love me?!" 

Cas goes numb, and stumbles through the doorframe with the last ounce of energy he has.

 

***

 

Castiel is once again in the grand abyss of sewerage. It's grotesque, and he winces. He was not supposed to return here, ever. He circles the hollow cave with his tired eyes, comes around the other end behind him, and there she is. The djinn. Lying sprawled in a pool of her own blood, long limbs tangled and bent at impossible angles, her life's essence steaming into the air like a wailing tea kettle. She's gone, probably has been for a while now. 

Dean rips Cas's grace from a mossy cord around her neck. 

Her compromised soul has already been drunken out of her, and all that's left now is this broken, mutilated corpse that he'll see, if he opens his eyes again, and he hasn't ever cried as much as he has in the last hour. 

…He had never gotten the chance to thank her. 

 

***

 

"Cas?"

He collapses; whether it's from exhaustion or blunt agony, he doesn't know. 

 

***

 

"Cas? Cas! Dean, get his grace!" 

The first voice sounds like someone he might know, maybe, watered down and derailed with panic. Castiel, in all his ignorance, does not enjoy the prospects of imminent doom - he is conscious enough to know that. 

He's almost asleep again, has almost slipped back into the maternal and cradling world of black silence, but he can feel a warm, thick hand curling around the nape of his neck and there's a certain gentility to the slow roughness of it, and then something lovely enters his soul. Something courageous, and fierce and large and winged, and unforgiving. 

Coherent thought escapes him, and his famished brain can't quite form the words inside his head, can't quite find the letters, but he knows it's his grace. He welcomes it inside him like an old friend. 

It fills him, every part of him, and for a moment Cas feels large, feathery fixtures on either side of him, powerful and strong and blasting him with energy. 

His eyes pop open, and Dean Winchester is centimeters from his lips. 

But only for a second, because his neck recoils back into his collarbones and his deltoids shiver with the exhilaration of a near miss, and his arms fly across Cas's body from where they were before (caging Cas and keeping him safe, like a shyly doting eagle) almost as soon as Castiel wakes; and heaving breaths color his cheeks a pale burgundy. His freckles stand out like that, like capsules of charcoal flung against his flesh, crying ripples of hot blush all over his face (and chest, Cas imagines, under his shirt), and Cas is experiencing sudden and chronic id-level needs to touch that chest, to trace the patterns of bees and the secrets of life onto his flushed skin. He almost does, but there's something behind Dean's eyes that stops him, that crushes his fingers with sheer, willful insistence. 

"Cas, you awake?" The eyes squint with effort and flood with worry that waterfalls invisibly onto the floor beside s Cas, running toward him in pools of seething, steaming liquid honesty. Cas bends his body around it and sucks his stomach in, doesn't want to come in contact with it, he can't imagine the writhing pain it comes with. 

He nods his head. 

"Thank god." Sam speaks from behind Cas somewhere, but Cas can't see him, only the glowing relief in his brother's face; and the brooding distress seeping from Dean’s eye sockets seeps slowly back into them, and Cas fights the urge to wipe it from his cheeks. He blinks twice and it's gone, anyway. 

He sits up, and finally everything comes into focus. 

"Hello, Dean." Castiel cocks his head and stares at his wrists, not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because Dean is analyzing him like he would analyze bacteria under a microscope, and Cas is tired of that feeling. 

"God, Cas, we thought we lost you for a moment there." 

"No, Dean, I'm just a bit out of sorts."

Sam chuckles, relieved, and Cas thanks him silently. "Let's at least get you cleaned up, okay?"

 

***

 

Cas can't see much when his vision is this blurred and separated with fatigue, but he can track movement, even with the tattered grace behind his eyes. He can see Dean and Sam talking, and he knows it's about him. Even if he couldn't hear them, he would know. 

"Dean, c'mon. You're the one who got him into this mess of a case in the first place, and your whole spiel about independence and potential and whatever – you got him all excited, and now look at him...." he nods off in Cas's direction, and Cas slams his eyelids together and exhales heavily. He needs to get better at eavesdropping. 

"I mean, dude, the least you can do is apologize to him.” Sam adjusts his footing and crosses his arms. He has a point. 

"Yeah..." Dean trails off in response, and Cas can feel his eyes sweeping across his own shivering, blanket-bundled body. It brings on another round of shuddering, a different, deeper kind. 

"Dude, don’t be like this. I don't know everything that happened back there, but it couldn't have been enough to warrant this...silent treatment. I mean, any more of this and you'll both be suffering through _separation_ _anxiety_." He shakes his head slightly in Cas's direction, and turns around, heading towards an inevitably safer area. 

Dean steps cautiously towards Cas, and Cas's heart races underneath the rough, scratchy yellowed blankets between him and a hasty refusal, a practical lie where he's capable of fixing himself, thank you. 

And as much as he would cherish throwing that kind of shade, he knows he really does need help. And, as much as he hates to admit it, there's a certain comfort in Dean's intentions. 

So he lets the hunter stalk towards him, bow legged, forced (and still so distant, awkward), pleasantries waiting on his tongue, Cas imagines, as he goes. Cas feels him pause right in front of him, staring, probably reconsidering. 

_ I have kissed you, _ Cas thinks.  _ I have kissed you, and I have made love to you, and I have told you that I love you, and you don't remember any of it.  _

"Cas?"

"Hello, Dean." Cas shakes out his hair and looks straight at Dean through a slightly-less-painful filter of bedhead, scratching his chin and pulling up the covers around him. They'll have to suffice as a sort of armor, for now. 

"Oh, you're awake." He sounds genuinely surprised, his voice fluctuating and his eyebrows scrunching together; and underneath his fluffy carapace, Cas smirks. "Huh." He takes another moment to stare at Castiel, his head cocked, reminiscing. He's probably whitewashing those dirty, painful scenes from the djinn’s world out of his head right now, erasing them with a metaphorical rag full of rubbing alcohol. Cas winces. He wishes he had alcohol, right now. 

"Listen, uh," He pauses cautiously, and Cas braces himself for the spew of contrived word vomit about to echo in his ears. "I'm really sorry. About everything. The sewers, the djinn, everything." 

Cas blinks. "I don't want your pity." 

Dean stumbles back with the impact of Cas’s words, his weight bobbing rearward and forcing his balance away from him. Good. Cas pulls the unassailable swaths of cotton over his elbows, enveloping his chest in a calming warmth. He doesn't need this right now. He wishes he never needed it in the first place.

"Hey, man, I know you’ve been through - a lot -"

Cas stares him down for a few more cherished moments. Still, he keeps his mouth shut and his eyes open, reading between the lines.

“I mean, that was hard for  _ me _ , to get you out of there, it was hard to see you like that, because you wanted to stay so bad, and – and I  _ know _ what that feels like, so does Sam. You liked what you saw, I get that. And it must have been hell for you, I know. But you’re back, man, you have to snap out of it. It’s better here. It’s better, because we want you here and now you are and – and I’m not sure what you need me to say, but I want to help you. I want to make it up to you. Tell me how I can make it up to you.” He turns up the corners of his mouth, painfully, almost, and raises his eyebrows in a sort of sheepish  _ beg _ that Cas can’t stand. It all looks too familiar to him; Dean is fucking  _ teasing  _ him, and after all that he’s dragged himself through, after all he’s sacrificed. 

“What the hell, Dean? You were  _ in my head. _ And that’s over now, but you – you have – no  _ right-” _ Cas’s eyes seep with fluid that his shattered, dehydrated vessel obviously didn’t know it had, and he covers his face with his hands, and there’s salt water everywhere, he’s drowning, is this really how he plans on saying goodbye-

“What? Cas-” Dean tries to pry Cas’s hands off his face, tries to break the dam, but Cas can’t let him, he’ll open the floodgates and then they’ll all die, one by one, the stupid guilt choking them into sleep, the long, bruised fingernails of the djinn wrapped evilly around their throats, their stomachs full with sewer mire, memories, aching  _ memories, killing them, sending them into oblivion without the comfort of souls or light or God or even monsters like themselves. _

He shoves Dean away and tries to get past him, maneuver by without letting him see his tear-struck, blotchy face. “How  _ dare _ you – make fun of me, after all that I’ve – been through. You, you  _ loved  _ me, Dean-” Cas loses control and spirals into wet sobs, and Dean catches him. Holds him there, level against his steady heartbeat, soaking his shirt and not caring, because this is  _ Cas _ , this is someone he knows, someone he cares about more than most other things, someone he would go to the ends of the earth for.

Cas claws at the saturated flannel for a moment, weeping hysterically, but eventually his breathing slows and he lets Dean keep him there, his head nestled in the center of his sternum and his fingers gripping the hem of his shirt like a lifeline, because in a way, that’s what it is. He stays there, his defiance deflating out of him like helium from a balloon, not wanting to move or make Dean move. For a few moments, he’s not sure whether the world Dean brought him back to is any more real than the one he saved him from. 

In those moments, Dean lets himself indulge in Cas’s head underneath his chin, in his feathery black hair underneath his calloused hands. He stays still and wills time to do the same, cupping Cas’s peach-fuzzy neck to his ribcage and, with his other hand, supporting the small of his back and shielding him from the bitter-cold air. The diminishing sniffles slowly come to a stop and Dean’s facial muscles gently blossom into dimples, in what  _ could _ be christened adoration, if there were such witnesses to do so. 

But Cas is delirious and light-headed and practically lethargic from mourning, and incapable of christening anything at the moment, and Dean has carried more dead-weight than he has the capacity to tally. This is easy for him.

He picks Cas’s legs up from the floor, where they stagger and slip about like those of a newborn deer; and curls a hand around his neck, keeping his head safe, flush against his collarbone. Carries him, like a baby, back to the couch, where he can rest. 

_ Dean could’ve gotten defensive. He could’ve deconstructed, self-obliterated into a thousand tiny shards of white-hot anger and self-justifying nonsense, like an irregularly verbose supernova. He’s done it before. _

_ He doesn’t know why he didn’t do it this time. _

He sets the angel down gradually, delicately, like the fragile, combustible thing he is; and replaces all the covers so they fit him in a comfortable-looking way, in a way Dean imagines he might look sprawled on a mattress, not that it matters, or that he thinks about it. 

He looks so innocent, in sleep.

Dean brushes Cas’s hair up absentmindedly. There are speckles of dirt and dried sweat clustered along his hairline, but he presses his lips to it anyway, if only for a second. 

“I wouldn’t  _ mock _ you, I would never…hurt you like that, I could never-” He cuts himself off, his fingers dancing across the roughly stubbled jawline below him. He doesn’t even think about it, it’s just impulsive, really, and he likes the way it feels under the pads of his fingertips. And then he just says plainly, so it’s out there, “I’m sorry.”

In a lucid half-sleep, Cas can’t hear those words, but he dreams of a place where he can, and he does.

***

 

Cas awakes unusually satisfied. 

Maybe it's that he's cried himself out; he feels warm and weary and a little bit overwhelmed, but he doesn't ache anymore, at least not now. He looks around him; the occasional, quaint windows overlook a night sky the color and consistency of tar. These hours are unholy, as Dean would describe them. He is probably asleep now. He probably nodded off in the way that he always does, with his arms slung over his chest as if he had fallen asleep in a tomb rather than a bed. Often, a picture of his mother would be curled inside his relaxed knuckles as well, her eyes open and wary in the rare moments when his couldn't be. That's what Cas would see, were he to open Dean’s bedroom door. 

Which he wouldn't, of course, as the hours are un _ holy  _ at the moment. 

Even so, he finds himself a minute later perched on the balls of his feet between the dense folds of drywall on either side of Dean’s bedroom, hovering inside the doorframe, a practitioner of radical unorthodoxy; he hasn't done this in a very long time. (Although, Dean looks exactly as he'd pictured, save his legs sprawling across the comforter like the wings of a frantic butterfly.) He had almost forgotten how smooth Dean’s face could be in sleep, because usually he only sees it in creased aggravation or freckled and temporary bursts of satisfaction. 

His face looks paler than it is, as the only light comes from the room across the hall – and Cas can hardly see his freckles now. He doesn't want to wake Dean up, but he needs his presence, and something torrential and balmy and pleasant falling from the cavities of his heart to the bottom of his stomach says the other man might not mind quite so much. 

Cas brings all his courage forward and uses it as a sort of momentum to drive him to the side of the bed where Dean’s head is practically suspended from the pillow and half-flung over the edge of the mattress, and tentatively cups his shoulder.  

“Dean?” There's no response, but for a low, throaty moan that seems to emanate from the entire bed and not just from Dean himself, and also some repudiation-based kicking. 

“Dean-”

“Cas?!” The sleeping beauty jerks into an upright position and snorts wetly into Cas’s face, his eyes held open only by adrenaline and his hand brandishing a small pistol. Cas is unfazed.  

“Dean, hello, I apologize sincerely but I wasn't really able to sleep even though I wanted to, I really did, something about my grace, maybe.” Cas could keep babbling, maybe for hours, in the awkwardly sophisticated dialect that he speaks, but Dean cuts him off. 

“Dude, it's fucking two, in the damn  _ morning _ , or whatever the fuck…” Dean trails off, rubbing his eyes vigorously, and Cas has evidently also forgotten that his capacity to be mindlessly inappropriate is boundless. “What the  _ shit _ , buddy?” Indeed.

Cas responds promptly with bullshit, considering he's not really sure now why he woke Dean up in the first place. Wanted to hear his voice, maybe. 

“Oh. Um, I need your help…with something.” The  _ something  _ ends high-pitched and shrill, like he means it to be a question. 

Dean’s hands drop from his face and he flops back down onto the fraying pillows surrounding him, groaning exasperatedly, and Cas feels awkward and embarrassed for even coming in here. He needs something, but he doesn't know what it is, and Dean wouldn't know, so why bother him? 

“And it couldn't wait until an acceptable time to be awake?” Dean rolls his eyes with a flare of drama and defiance and even morning badass, if that's an existing phenomenon. 

( _ What a queen _ , Cas thinks accidentally.) 

“Oh. Um, well, it's gotten to the point where I can't really, um, wait any longer.” Cas shuts his eyes tight and prays for a reprieve of sorts, at least on his choice of diction. He doesn't know much about pornography, other than what he's watched, but this whole ordeal is starting to look like the opening scene to one. He would laugh at himself, if his stomach didn't feel so clenched. 

Dean’s eyes widen subtly, something Cas would not have noticed had they not been intensely staring at him. 

“Oh. Okay. What is it?” All the aggravation has left his voice, and he sounds guilty, almost. Indebted. “Do you need something to help you sleep? I don't know that they'd work on angels, but I have some pills, and I guess you guys can't really overdose, you could just take the whole bottle-”

Cas sighs, for real reasons, and allows his conscience to assemble an unnervingly random lexicon of words, and then he just spits them out of his mouth like bullets. BS-ing it, Dean would say. “Well, my wings haven't been cleaned since the apocalypse and I know they're hardly even wings now, what with so little power, but I think maybe I'd be stronger if I could do this, but I can't, at least not by myself.” Cas is oddly content with this proposition, mostly because it's not entirely untrue (he hasn't cleaned his wings in  _ so  _ long, he has almost forgotten completely that such a concept applies to him) and he’s pleased with his conscience, something that usually forsakes him in times like these. He was not built for this kind of – gawky – interaction. 

Dean is silent for a few long seconds, swallowing dryly and smacking his jaw, startling green eyes narrowed in thought. 

“So you have wings, then?”

“Dean, I am an angel. I exist, and so do my wings. We  _ do  _ cease to be allusions here. In reality.” Alright, so that was sitcom-esque, and sarcastic as all hell, but Dean buys it.

“Sure, that's not too- hard to believe, [ _ yes it is,  _ Cas thinks.  _ With you, there is nothing fully credible. _ ] but- I mean- you can't just- use your angel voodoo to snap ‘em clean? Aren't you supposed to be badass? Independent…creatures-who-don't-need-no-trifling-man kind of thing?” Dean slowly comprehends what he's said and Cas can see his muscles tense, waiting for him to recoil, lash out at him for being ignorant and discourteous, but Cas won't do that. He sees it as an opportunity. 

“No,  Dean…we can’t all be entirely self-reliant.” He looks down, in the realization that he's made himself sentimental, and hopes that Dean feels it too. 

He can see him fumbling for words, falling into a default setting of repetition and cliché. 

“Alright?”

“Okay.”

 

***

 

“Is there a…bigger one?” Cas circumnavigates the tiny, quaint restroom containing only a surprisingly clean, claustrophobic-looking (even for an angel,  _ especially  _ for one) shower and claw-footed-bathtub medley, right across from a rustic sink beside a porcelain toilet that looks like it's seen some shit that's shittier than shit, if Cas even knows what he's thinking. The square footage appears to approximate between fifteen and twenty, including the shower space, and burly Dean seems to take up at least half of that.

“Well, how big are your wings?” Dean says artificially. Cas nods inattentively; between his standards and the standards of the celestial beings he stems from, he has no idea. 

So, he guesses. “I've never had reason to measure, but I would assume at least thirty feet across.” Dean gulps. Cas watches his Adam’s apple bob, up and down. Mesmerizing. 

“All the bathrooms are like this.”

“And the kitchen or the dining room would not be ideal for this? I assume?”

Dean exhales roughly, and chuckles with a hearty tiredness that carries, low and grumbling, into the antiquely papered walls. Cas would shush him, but he likes the sound more than he likes the suffocating silence that prefaced it. 

“We probably wouldn't want Sam waking up to the glory of God literally slapping him in the face.” He smirks at the imagery, and Cas doesn't get it, but he doesn't say anything either. Dean notices this and immediately straightens out his face, like he's ashamed for laughing. 

There are worse things to be ashamed for. 

“Alright. Well,” Dean says again, “what am I gonna need for this? Do wings have some sort of special cleaner? Can you handle a little bleach? Is this more of a stain thing, or a stuff-is-stuck kinda thing? Should I grab, like, a rake?” Dean speaks, fast and rambling and goofy, almost, and tension leeches out of Cas’s shoulders like ectoplasm. It seems like he's managed to cut some of the distance between them, put there by everything he's done, but there's still an atmosphere of contrived and counterfeit and  _ pretending _ dangling from the oxygen around them, like superficial Christmas ornaments, that some house-cat will catch and break and maybe even swallow the shards of. And even if Castiel is  _ in love _ with Dean (a principle he doesn't quite understand, only in that people have been in it with him, at least that Dean has told him; like Meg, who died, and Hannah, who died also; and mainly the reason he's so unfamiliar with the doctrine of it is because he's avoided letting himself consider it at all) then their friendship would still mean more, and if anything what hurts the most is the  _ distance _ , so he tells himself that's his job, to close it. 

And he laughs, a gravelly, warped euphoria that he himself hasn't heard in forever. 

“No, hands are just fine.”

But he shuts up quickly, remembering that this, this process of what he described as “wing cleaning” is much more intimate than he has suggested, a thing usually only done by angels and their mates, a thing representing reliance and codependency, and he's probably taking this too fast. But there's nothing to take, he reminds himself sadly, nothing, whether it's fast or slow or nonexistent, like it is. 

“Oh,” Dean says, “okay.” 

Cas can't stand the wholesome quiet; it teases him, like an eight-year-old would, pointing fingers and singing limericks that expose him for things he can't accept. The bunker is just beginning to light up with the rose-and-salmon-and-threadbare-yellow-Converse spectrum of sunrise, and Cas can see it filtering through the tight round windows lining the high ceilings. 

“Are you ready?” It sounds dumb, when he asks it, and he knows it must be hard to take him seriously when he says things like that, but he ignores it and the blush threatening to creep up his neck. “I'm – um – going to show you, now.” 

Dean nods and opens his mouth like he's going to say something, but doesn't. Cas pivots so his shoulders are parallel to the doorframe and the shower across from it. He's not going to fit in here. (Truthfully, he's almost proud of that.)

Cas thinks about his wings, bulky and cumbersome as they are – their avian beauty, primaries and coverts and quills and plumes and all, and he imagines them here, wants them here, and then they are. It takes focus; usually they only conjure  _ themselves  _ up, in fight-or-flight type situations. (And arousal – but he is above, he tells himself, such primitive behaviors.) 

But now they're here again, for the first time in so long, and Dean is almost sliced in two by their length. Cas can feel them on his back, tearing his clothes deliciously and weighing him down with awful power. The feathers are sparse and some are even little buds, looking as if they're about to bloom back, but he knows they won't. He's intrinsic of them all the same, battered and totaled as they are. He turns his head and Dean’s eyes are gliding across all 10 meters of him, and he shudders deliberately, shaking himself out. He loves the feeling of omnipotence it gives him; everything in his wake he could destroy or finesse, if he wanted to, and an otherworldly surge of dopamine and adrenaline and serotonin all in one glows in the branches of his arteries. 

 

***

 

Dean can't close his mouth but to lick his lips, which are dry and chapped with sleep still, and static with electricity. 

Cas’s wings are a deep maroon-orange, like the chest of a robin, or a San Francisco flower garden blooming with poppies and bougainvillea – that’s what it looks like, streaked with shots of navy blue so dark they look black and the feathers ombré-tipped in a rush of brilliant white. They are colossal and glossy and sharp and lethal; not at all what Dean expected. 

He dreams about Cas’s wings often, about fluffy white caricatures of angelic grace that surround him in towering chimneys of heaven. These are not those. These are terrifying and emanate almost tangible hits of overwhelming fear and conditional security, commanding respect; and Cas’s face matches, his vessel consumed with the divinity of it. Dean finally manages to shut his mouth and blink out the instinctual urges to kneel before him, and suddenly the heavenly structures are less glowy, less celestial. No less dazzling, and still frightening and perfectly handsome, for lack of other words, but not as intensive. Thank god, or Dean might've shit his pants. 

He raises his eyebrows in a sort of wowed-yet-inquisitive gesture, cocking his head and silently asking what the hell is going on. 

“Sorry,” Cas replies, quickly and dazedly, like he's blissed out, almost. Fucked out. 

The thought of it makes the coarse hairs on Dean’s arms stand straight up. 

“What was that?” His voice is hoarse like he's never used it before, even though he spoke coherent English but a moment ago. Something his tongue won't comply to, now. 

“I saw you struggling, and I toned it down, a little. I think it should be better now, easier to focus.” Dean's not so sure. The shadows of his wings cast a deep contour against the sweeping back muscles from which they protrude, and Cas’s hair is mussed, and his forehead sweaty, from the effort, and Dean can't help thinking he is beautiful. 

“What do you want me to do? They don't look so dirty…” but Cas changes something, again, and now his the feathers of his wings are oily and splotched in places, and covered at random intervals in unidentifiable debris that, Dean thinks, could classify as extraterrestrial. “Oh. Well, now that you put it that way…” he giggles. He never giggles, but today he suspects he'll do many more things he hasn't done before. Cleaning the wings of an angel, for instance. 

“Uh-” Cas stutters and Dean pictures his mind blanking, because his is too. “Try to start with anything caught in between the feathers. That should be easiest.” He turns his head and stares diligently at the bathroom wall, patiently waiting. Dean feels weird, going in with his bare hands, feels like he's touching something restricted or off-limits. He does it anyway –  the angel is waiting – so he goes for the plumes nearest his hands. There's a piece of something sharp there, so he grabs it by both sides and can feel it grating against his skin, sheathed in the same oil apparent on the feathers themselves, and attempts to draw it out. It gets caught, though, on the polyester fucking  _ shroud _ Cas is wearing. 

He inhales deeply and holds the air in his lungs, and out of consequence his next words are breathy as hell. “Cas, buddy, I don't want to infringe on your angelic modesty or whatever, but you're gonna have to strip down if this is going to work.” Alas, a sense-making, if odd-sounding, sentence. Dean forgets to breathe back in while he waits for a response, and the tiny room feels too humid as his words hang wet and expired in the air, and Cas is still silent. Dean is tempted to tap his foot, or his fingers against the white sheen of the sink – something rude, but Cas reaches up and over his head and, slowly, removes his pajamas until there's nothing left but a pair of plain cotton boxer shorts. 

And Dean hasn't breathed for several minutes now, it feels like. He gasps, conspicuously, and he has enough of an angle on Cas to see him half-smile, blushing, his clothes layered in a ring around his socked feet on the floor. Dean himself is flushed, cheekbones overheating and jawline clenching with suppressed words. He ignores a mocking voice in the back room of his subconscious that suggests remarkably perverse things, and wonders what that makes him. 

“Thanks.” He says monotonously, quietly, because pushing anything else out of his throat would be futile. He replaces his hands gently on either side of the giant thing, and tries again. With nothing to hold on to, the anonymous clusterfuck slides out with a thick, moist  _ pop _ . Cas grimaces, and Dean is afraid he's hurt him, because he's making noises like a wounded animal. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, into Cas’s ear, only  _ just barely  _ loud enough for him to hear it. “Do you want me to stop?” 

“No,” he heaves, his chest rising and falling rapidly, and Dean can hear his own heart beating in his ears at that same pace. “No, it's okay.” 

Dean spreads his hands across the tips of the feathers, ruffling them as if his fingertips are a breeze and the wings are a lazy brush, daintily swept aside by his touch. He feels a stray one underneath his palm, coated in the warm oil again, and he retracts his hand mechanically at the foreign texture of it; dense and smooth, warm, almost pulsing. He rubs the substance between his fingers; it has the same consistency and color as vanilla extract, but when he raises it to his nose it smells fresh and summery and light, like perfume. He feels like washing his face in it, but he doesn't, even though in this state of mind he likely would. He retraces the misplaced feather, and braces himself, and pulls on it by the fringe. Cas groans and his eyes roll back, Dean can see, and it's so gorgeous to know him like this, like he's unraveling. He goes down the line of primary plumage, straightening out whatever needs straightening, and for each tuft of downy ink-red he receives a precession of tinny, desperate sounds from Cas; moans and groans bordering on sexual, and he fights the urge to answer him back in the same language. 

Dean uses his fingers to scrape through Cas’s left wing until it's free of the unknown detritus, and then runs hand back over it, looking for anything he missed. He admires his handiwork, pressing mildly across the sea of dark folds, mystified by the creature beneath his hands. It's unlike anything he's ever seen. His wrist is grazed by a ridge where Cas’s shoulder blade would be, underneath all the feathers. Tentatively, he circles it with the pad of his thumb, and Cas almost screams. 

“What's – this?” Dean catapults the words of off of his tongue, and it’s practically bleeding saliva, and he doesn't know what he's so hungry for. This is  _ Cas.  _

But Cas is trembling with something pent-up and important, and Dean tries not to press too close to the newly clean, soft feathers as he speaks. 

“Those are – ah – oil glands. They're meant to be self-cleaning, but they're obsolete when my wings are this – mm, dirty.” Dean nods and Cas can't see it, because he's behind him. He's grateful as fuck for this, because in the throes of conversation, he's stepped back to observe his job, and he's in awe. Cas’s whole body is crimson and sanguine, from head to toe, and his skin almost matches his wings. It's ethereal. Dean is drawn back into the heat, and deciding he could use help, he scrapes tenderly at the quills until he finds what he’s looking for. He trails his index finger ever-so-lightly across the supposed gland, and then suddenly finishes, applying as much pressure as he can and dragging  _ up  _ in a graceful, swooping gesture that he's sure will  _ ruin  _ Cas. And it does: his wing flares across the room, and he cries out some nonsense, Enochian maybe, and for a moment Dean sees what his wings would look like, fully extended and maternal, protecting him. He isn't aware that his hands are back on Cas, like magnets to steel, until Cas tenses and squeaks out a little  _ please _ , and Dean mumbles something inarticulate back under his breath, and it could be Cas’s name but he isn't paying attention – and he has no idea what the other man is thinking, no clue. 

He rolls his knuckles across the gland again, and is rewarded with a flush of the sweet oil, and he spreads it,  _ kneads  _ it, into Cas’s wings, and Dean leans in closer until he can actually  _ feel  _ the moans emitting from Cas twitching through him. 

Too soon, the seraph’s feathered amenities are sparkling and immaculate again, gleaming with the luster of the glandular fluid. But Cas is still writhing, waiting for something, though, and Dean is overcome with the need to give him what he wants. What similar things they are, want and need. 

He strokes all the way from the tips of the upper majors to the base of the appendages, and tugs aggressively on the strong pinions there, and he can feel the strain of it – the want – all the way through his body, and Cas wails, both of his wings spreading open, beautiful, in rainbows of warmth, filling the entire room with the stellar clarity of God. 

“ _ Dean- _ ”

And something about the way he says his name is like an explosion, and he's awake again, and he's still blinded by the stunning pair of powerful wine-red subsidiaries in front of him – but now he can see that it's all too much, for both of them, it's too fast and too much and too  _ now _ . The mirror to the side of him is steamed with the close, undulating breaths crowding against it, but not enough as to where he can't see his own lust-blown pupils, and the front of his pants is tented and he doesn't want to look at Cas again, is afraid he'll need to stay. 

And when has Dean Winchester ever been controlled by  _ need _ ?

The answer is too many times; he drops his hands to his sides and walks stiffly away, putting one foot in front of the other, not thinking anything at all. 

***

 

Dean treads steadily, shoving aside every surfacing thought. In his head, he drowns them, holds them under the breathless, fluid memories until they fall into quiet submission, draped limply across the walls of his brain. 

He walks all the way to the garage, where the fluorescent lights are meager and exiguous, and the few feet in front of him look like they’ll shepherd him into oblivion. 

A key and a lock later, he's in his impala, and then another and the engine is running – and he puts his weight into the car and it's gone, he's gone, away from it all – running away, just like he's never let himself do. 

Dean drives like some people shoot heroin, or pop pills; incessantly, hopelessly.

 

***

 

He snorts himself awake, and the radio is still on. Somehow, he'd managed to fall asleep, even against the loud, crackling static. 

He's in a parking lot somewhere, and his first waking thought is  _ oh, I’m not in Kansas anymore.  _

He hasn't answered his phone even though he's sure Sam must have fucking  _ plagued  _ it with calls, and he still doesn't want to check. His head has cleared with sleep, and he understands now how strange it all is, and he hates himself for leaving – but more so, he hates himself for how he feels. Which translates, really, to  _ still not ready to go back _ – so he won't. 

Maybe soon he'll decide he can, but for now he needs a solid cup of joe and a case, a vamp maybe, something to encompass his interests and shield them from all things  _ Cas.  _

He follows a patchy green pickup until he finds the center of the town, six or seven miles from where he'd fallen asleep off the road a ways – and finds a little diner where he can open his laptop and damn near melt into it, into the puffy-eyed infatuation of case-searching, with nothing but a slice of pie and the blackest coffee they have by his side. He deserves this time to himself. 

He's in North Platte, Nebraska, according to the signs he sees, and that's far but not too far from the bunker; he can handle it. He stalks into the diner and plops into a booth at the far corner and hopes he's inconspicuous there, and sets his stuff up like he would at home, like he's at the dining room table there. 

He misses that pretentious mahogany thing already, but this'll have to do.

A waiter approaches him, and his throat is sandpapery with misuse. He tells the tiny girl what he wants, and she scampers off to get it for him. 

He doesn't expect anyone to talk to him again, at least not for a while, so he hunches over the neon, opulent glow of his computer in the dewy morning light that filters through the shutters behind him, and searches for things like “freaky accidents” and “weird disappearances”. 

Nothing comes up for a while, except for his food, and he pushes it away like a picky toddler and sips at the caffeine he's given instead, not caring that the searing burn of it is shredding his tongue apart, even kind of likes it. He finds what he's looking for within half an hour, but only when he gets up and stealthily grabs a newspaper from the rack by the vending machine and opens it, turning pages rhythmically, not really reading even though his eyes go through the motions.  

Somewhere close to him is a werewolf, it sounds like, and some missing hearts and their empty corpses. He decides then he'll check it out, in – he glimpses again at the paper in his lap – in  _ Wisner, Nebraska,  _ it says, and drive the smoke out of his skull,  _ literally  _ drive _ it away.  _

He thinks then he might be fine. 

 

***

 

Dean straightens his navy blue, polka-dotted tie; he hopes it won't make him look any less credible. 

His fake (like everything, dammit) FBI badge bumps against his chest, inside his coat, bouncing with every step he takes, and it all feels like a melting watercolor color painting; or maybe a planet he's never been to before, where everything is made of packaging peanuts and painted to look like the set of a high-school play. 

It's exceptionally disorienting. 

He follows the chatter he hears anyway, and it leads him through the squat, blocky hospital (it reminds him of the dream-worldly edifice where he found Cas, that night he had to save him from himself) to the coroner’s office, where a bright lab coat shines fiercely and distinctly, facing away from him. 

He taps it on the shoulder, and a chunky little man turns around to meet his eyes. He looks intimidated, and Dean doesn't blame him. Identifies with him, actually, because he intimidates himself. 

“Hi, I’m with the FBI. Agent Collins,” he says. “I'm here about the bodies? Missing hearts, claw marks, the whole shebang?” Dean smacks his lips and shifts his weight casually, waiting for a response. 

“You know, when the first one of you guys showed up, I was confused. Now there's two of you, and I'm still confused. Why would the FBI waste two agents on an animal attack case? I'll never understand you narcs.” The coroner shakes his head and Dean is a bit taken aback, not just by his aggressively flamboyant Italian accent, but by his remark about another officer. He opens his mouth and closes it, scrunching his eyebrows thoughtfully. 

“There’s another fed here?” Dean’s fists clench at his own out-of-character slip, but the tiny European guy just purses his lips and throws up his hands in resignation. 

“Whatever. Last I saw, down the hall a ways.”

Dean follows his pointed finger down the sterile white corridor. He turns into the first door on his left, and there's a ward with a single cot and a single, comatose woman nestled inside. Next to her is a fucking  _ row  _ of IV tubes that puncture a morbid line along her wrist in puckered little craters. He recognizes her from the newspaper - she's the wife of one of the victims. The only survivor, if he can recall. He remembers the story in its entirety, and recognizes that she and her husband must have been in some terrible kind of love, for him to jump in front of her like that, between her and the monster.

For a terrifying instant, he relates to her misfortune, to having been left alone and incomplete. But, then, he can't remember why. 

And then the reason presents itself, right there and then. 

“Dean?” Speak of the devil.

He pivots towards the familiar voice. It belongs to a tan, squinting man, shorter than Dean, looking unintentionally sultry with his mussed and fluffy black hair sticking up all over his scalp as if someone had grabbed him by it and dragged him all the way to where he's standing – and also somehow simultaneously laughable, with his pristinely ironed suit and badge clinging to his steady palm as if he’s some professionalized manifestation of himself. The last person Dean wants to see right now.

“ _ Dammit _ , Cas!” he slams his fist down on the nearest table to his hand, test tubes strewn and flying; and he hates how even though he’s angry, he'd much rather have Cas slam him down on this slab of antiseptic white plastic, and shield him from visibility with those gorgeous wings and fuck into him slowly and bite his ears while he whispers into them. How Dean is good, how he can be saved. 

What he hates is objectifying Cas like this, hates that this is how he thinks. It’s blasphemy, makes him feel like he's spray-painting a monastery with cum. 

He's so  _ frustrated.  _

Cas’s expression morphs from the infuriating calm of his entrance into a panicky apprehension. “Dean, we should do this somewhere else…” He glances uneasily at the pitiful, hospitalized patient adjacent to him, and there’s an unmistakable fluttering of feathers before they are both suddenly standing in a secluded janitor’s closet in the same hospital, no place to look but at each other.

Dean raises his eyebrows and frantically pulls his fingers through his hair, staring at the clutter of cleaning supplies at his feet. He has nothing to be mad at Cas for. This isn't his fault. 

_ A lot of things are, but not this.  _

“Man, why'd you come looking in the first place? I thought I told you, I just need some time alone.” Dean stares at his shoes, wondering how on earth this is going to play out. Cas cocks his head, his Marianas-trench-blue eyes glittering with what’s now anxious curiosity. 

“And when, Dean, were you planning on coming back?”

Dean raises his head, and Cas is a lot closer than he remembers him being. In fact, he can feel the oxygen between them 

crackle and heat up like it's in a microwave, or maybe like Dean himself is an oven or even a  _ crematorium, and _ Cas just opened him up and now there's smoke clinging to their clothes in a foggy ether that clogs both of their nostrils and their throats, and they choke to death. 

_ Optimism.  _

From the moment he left, somewhere tingly in the pit of his stomach knew he wasn't going back. 

He squeezes his eyelids together and crosses his fingers inside the pockets of his slacks, like a little kid, like when Sam used to ask him,  _ is Daddy gonna come home soon _ , and Dean didn't have an answer. 

He's not his father. He's  _ worse.  _ At least John always came home, sometime, whether home was a car or a hotel or a fucking  _ street corner.  _

“I wasn't.”

Cas’s lips purse and the lines around his eyes unfold into slackened shock, and Dean can see him almost turn around and walk away. The simple fact that he stays makes him much stronger than Dean will ever be.

And it's purely instinctual, but he grabs him, embraces him anyway, holds him to his chest with a newfound vitality he thought he'd lost forever in the throes of depression and bloodlust. He holds the seraph, because it's his last chance to - because he needs the memory of it. He  _ requires  _ it. 

“Cas,” he says, tilting his chin up and forcing eye contact, “This is impossible. One of us has to go, and I'm not going to let it be you.”

They stare at each other, and for half an instant Dean contemplates the ideal – a scenario in which he and Cas could coexist, could sleep in the same queen-sized bed with rings on their fingers, between clean, pressed sheets and a luminous floral comforter wrapped around them and pushing them together; and every morning they’d wake up and exchange soulful, drowsy gazes (blue on green on blue) before getting up and dressing in each other’s lazy, monochromatic button-up tees and nothing else, and making each other coffee and breakfast and eating it together, while they talked about their normal every-day dilemmas like their taxes and maybe even their kids instead of arguing over frozen burritos and whatever apocalypse was facing them next. They’d live somewhere comfy and ornate, a white two-story not too far from Sam, and they’d be so  _ happy. _

…But as quickly as the ridiculous sentiment arrived, it’s gone again, riding on a wave of cynicism and impossibilities and  _ never gonna happen. _

Dean brushes it from his thoughts and wills away the aggravation boiling in his stomach.

He licks his lips, and looks up, and Cas is millimeters from him, staring him down with such integrity that the scarce air between them sizzles with potential and things-to-be, and Dean knows it’s going to happen before it happens; it was bound to happen.

He closes his eyes and his entire body tenses, waiting.

And then, Castiel grabs his navy blue, polka dotted tie (a good choice, Dean decides suddenly), and pulls it towards him and Dean thinks that even if he hadn't he would've fallen into him anyway. Gravity would have wanted him to. 

And Cas’s lips hit him with such force that it bludgeons his eyes open, and from there – against the cracking lilac wallpaper of the muddled, hushed janitor’s closet – he can see everything. He can see Cas sweeping the hair out of his face and tracing his cheekbones, and he can feel it, too, can feel the vivacity of his touch filter through his skin and into his veins, where it turns into adrenaline and spurs him to do the same; so he kisses Cas back, takes a hold of his jaw lightly and holds him to his mouth so he can do what he’s been waiting to do, so he doesn’t have to hold back, and it’s sweet and chaste on the outside but the interior of it, the intention, is heated and misty and opaque with lust.

It’s stunning, and Dean can feel it in every particle of his being. Every atom, quaking in its boots.

With an echoing sigh, he breaks away for a moment and rests his forehead against that of the other man’s, and he can hear and feel them both breathing heavily, panting against each other in exhilaration, and neither of them has spoken but in all honesty Dean’s not sure he’d remember how. 

It’s a good thing, then, that it’s Cas who talks first.

“Stay with me,” he murmurs, and they’re both whizzed back to reality, where none of it can happen and none of it should. “Just until we finish this case.”

Cas opens his eyes and looks at Dean, and there’s a knot in Dean’s throat that’s just building by the millisecond, and he feels like he’s undergoing all the stages of dehydration in the few moments that he’s been allowed to think about it – and he bumps his nose against Cas’s once more out of temptation and staggers back like he’s inebriated (which he could be, he can’t remember but he rarely isn’t) and remembers, like a blade to his gut, that it can’t work.

But, there’s a chance he could taste it, just at least for a few days, and he wants to take that chance so bad. 

“Please, Dean?”

He scoops the nape of Cas’s baby-soft neck in his hands again, and nods his head against his lips. He’s not smiling, because it’s inevitable that he won’t want to, but he kisses him.

He kisses him with all he has, because he’s all he’s got.

 

***

 

They break apart, and it's like grand canyons bloom open in their flesh, giant crevasses overflowing with feeling. 

“A one-time thing.” Dean says, and he means the favor, not the kiss. The kiss, he could live a thousand times over.

The pressure released reminds Dean of when he was a kid and he used to siphon plastic cups onto his face by sucking all the air out of them, and then when he'd let go his mouth would be red and swollen and his lungs would be empty and avid. 

Come to think of it, almost exactly like that. 

There’s a gawky silence, and then Cas’s phone rings, piercing the air with shrill and high-pitched electronica that hurts Dean’s ears. He’ll get into Cas’s phone later - he's not his brother, but he knows how to change a ringtone. 

(And as much as he expects himself to switch it to something hardcore, by Foreigner or something, he knows in his heart it'll probably be SexyBack by Justin Timberlake)  

Cas fishes it out of the chest pocket of his wrinkled (Dean’s hands, he did that, in only a few minutes and he's proud. Shut up.) white shirt and puts it to his ear, his eyes falling away from Dean’s sheepishly. 

“Yes, this is agent Aguilera.” 

Dean taps his foot lightly, and he’s impatient and stingy and always has been, but it makes him feel a little better that Cas wants him for it. 

_ And that's all it is. Desire, nothing more.  _

He sighs. 

His stomach turns. 

He reminds himself, he’s not supposed to want anything more. 

Cas smiles gently, holding the phone to his ear like it's going to shatter into a million silicon shards (that's just how Cas is) and Dean wonders how he can be happy with  _ this.  _

“There's been another attack?”

All at once, Dean plummets into hunter-mode, and stills his entire body, waiting for more information. 

“Yes.” Cas pauses, nodding his head mechanically. “Of course. Thank you so much for calling us. Oh,” he laughs, “that's what we're here for-” he stops again, like he's been cut off, and Dean wonders if it's that stuffy little Italian guy on the other line. “Yes, I honestly don't know why we're actually here, either, but we just…have to do what we're told. Hah.” He seems uncertain and self-conscious, with his lip curled and his eyelashes fluttering in concern, but Dean breaks the arid ravine of distance between them and and reaches for Cas’s face, tilts his chin up. It's more out of sheer  _ solicitude  _ than anything else. 

The pads of his fingertips hook onto the fuzzy skin stretched across the underside of Cas’s jaw, meandering across the slight arch there. A very human anatomy, containing – bursting with – something superhuman; magnificent. 

Cas just sighs, lightly, as if he exudes sunshine (and in a way he does). 

He smiles, and their eyes meet, and Dean feels like he could lay in sunshine for the rest of his life. 

“We’re on our way.”

 

***

 

“C’mon, sweetie, go ahead and tell us what happened.” Dean’s crouching on his knees to talk to the little girl and it hurts and reminds him that he's old, but he's does it anyway. Kids make him so  _ fucking  _ sentimental. 

She’s hardly eight years old, or so he's heard, 

(the same age as Ben was, he notes, when he found him),

but she's already lost everything she has. 

He can understand why it's difficult for her to even open her mouth.  

“I already talked to the police.” She says, and she looks numb. She's too young for this, and Dean has faced all manner of things bigger than this, but this reminds him of how painful even the smallest things can be. 

“Okay, well my partner and I,” he gestures at Cas, and almost gets caught up looking at him, because the empathy in the lines of his face is fascinating. “We’re better than the police. We’re actually going to help you.” She hiccups and if he squints, he can see the tear-tracks lining her cheeks.

“I was just – upstairs – and they were down here, and I was getting his camera from his office, because he wanted to take pictures because we were going to surprise Momma, it’s her birthday – today – and I came back down – and they were both gone –” She talks in disjointed fragments, trying to catch her breath because, Dean imagines, every stinging syllable knocks the wind right out of her.

“Gone?’ Cas interjects softly.

“No. The – the opposite of gone. They – were everywhere.” She sobs, and Dean knows exactly what she means. 

Granted, they’ll have to visit the house later, and see for themselves, but Dean has already created a sort of hypothesis in his head.

“Thank you.” Cas nods his head slowly and puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder and squeezes, microscopically, and Dean gets the message.

He gets up and he and Cas turn around the corner of the station and into another room, and as much as he wishes he knew how to comfort the girl, he has no idea, so in turn he doesn’t look back. Even so, he can hear her launching into another round of hysterics. 

“Cas, we could’ve learned a lot more from her.” He doesn’t know why he says it, but it’s true.

“Dean,” Cas shakes his head and jabs his hand to the side spastically, and it’s clear he disagrees. “Even if we could, we shouldn’t! The best thing for that little girl is immediate psychological attention, not interrogation from apathetic false FBI agents.” He looks Dean up and down in condescending scrutiny, and Dean squirms in discomfort.  _ It’s not a crime to want the job done. _

_ But,  _ he reminds himself,  _ why should I want this done at all? _

His eyeballs are far too heavy to move on from their focus on Cas’s lips, and it's a hearty fight just to bring himself to speak. 

“You’re right.”

Cas blinks and confusion flashes across his clandestinely azure eyes, but only for a second. He regains his composure, and Dean’d give  _ anything  _ to know what he’s thinking. 

“We should just talk to the officers  _ she _ talked to.”

He nods. “Sounds like a plan.”

Cas leaves. And Dean follows the tarnished khaki tail of his trenchcoat out the door, billowing out behind him like a flag.

 

***

 

Dean shuffles his feet and lets Cas do the talking, which he never does. But now he can't get Cas’s mouth out of his head, and how it felt against his, and how he wants that again – and he's afraid he'd just fuck it up. 

Cas’s negative-6 octave voice lulls persuasively in his ears, in the background, and Dean chooses to let the individual words blur together as his eyes wander across the police chief’s office around him. There aren't many personal affects, just a leather swivel chair (which Dean won't admit  _ definitely  _ inspires some immature temptation, right there) and a monochromatic array of pens. There's a vase of flowers near the plexiglass door, and a framed photo of two high-school aged blonde guys, probably his sons. But that's it. Very boring, for an office. 

Dean’s mind axles back to the case, and what he knows and what he doesn't. He's already seen pictures of the alleged crime scene on the guy’s iPhone, and there was a shit ton of blood. Like the girl had said, her parents were everywhere. And they haven't actually looked over the autopsies yet, but it didn't look like there was a lot to look over; and anyway, the point of focus had been that something had ripped into their torsos and taken their hearts, and in the process had ruined a lot more than just that. 

What kind of thing would do that?

Not a werewolf; he had thought that originally, but with the level of exsanguination that had burst like a fucking  _ blister  _ in the living room of the poor kid was not common among the mentioned species. 

The looming inherency of the question brings him back to the conversation unfolding in front of him, and he tunes in just as easily as if he'd been listening the entire time. 

“Was there anything otherwise notable about the most recent bodies?” Dean watches Cas’s hair as it sways with the rough-toned syllables that fall daintily out of his mouth, but then the officer looks at him weirdly, so he clears his throat and averts his gaze.

_ Focus, focus, focus focus focus focus focus. _

“Actually, it’s funny you should ask that.” The middle-aged, Beach-Boy-esque chief shifts his weight and nods pensively, in such a way that Dean starts to feel a weird, politician-like fakeness coming off of him in waves. He can almost _smell_ it, for God’s sake. “We’ve abandoned our previous prognosis, of animal attack. There wasn’t much to support it, and no animal native to this area could’ve done a job like that. That’s the work of a psychopath.” He widens his eyes pointedly. 

Dean almost says something, but Cas pinches his lower back without so much as deterring his gaze on the policeman. Dean frowns and side-glances him with a glare that he hopes reads very clearly, “dude!”, but he’s already talking again.

Man, he’s gotten good at this.

“And there weren’t any similarities you noticed between the victims?”

Frankly, it’s sexy.

“Well – not anything entirely likely to affect the tactics of a maniac, but as long as anything goes, both women – Mrs. Lawlor and Susan’s [ _ Susan _ , Dean thinks.  _ Her name. He owes the tragedy-stricken little girl that respect, to at least have something to remember her by. _ ] mother, are and were pregnant.”

Cas’s lips purse and Dean thinks simultaneously that that isn’t enough information, and Cas probably knows it. 

“Well, sir, thank you for your time.” It’s the first thing Dean has said this whole time and his voice is scratchy and unhinged but he just wants to get out of here.

“Oh, thank  _ you _ ! Here, take these photos, they’re copies anyway. We’ll let you know if we find anything else. Good day to you both.” He shoves the pixelated images towards Cas’s turned back in obviously superior trust, but Dean takes the opportunity to steal them from his hands and plant them in the pocket of his suit jacket, and then practically jogs in his slacks to catch up with Cas.

He’s strolling down the exit walkway of the station when he finally reaches him, and the distinct clacking of both of their dress shoes sounds obtrusively against the cement, masking the unimportant afternoon whispers of the small town surrounding them. It’s four-thirty and it qualifies as afternoon, technically, but it’s summer, and Dean figures it stays lighter later. They should fit in what they can, while they can.

“Hey, Cas,” he says lightly, and the seraph’s head nods in acknowledgement. “We’ve got enough work done, for today. And it’s nearly quitting time anyway. Look, the sun’s basically setting-”

“No it’s not.”

“Let’s go for a drink.”

Castiel bows his head, but Dean can see the corner of a smile wrapped around his face, can hear him mumble something almost indistinguishably.

“It’s a date.”

Dean hadn’t really considered it like that, but he supposes it won’t do much harm to _let_ Cas think it.

“C’mon, buddy, I’ll drive.”

 

***

 

Dean parks the impala perfectly, as he always has, and unloads his cargo (an unexpectedly talkative Cas) onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. It’s hardly a few blocks from the facility they have just left, and it just goes to show how damn  _ tiny  _ the town is.

It’s a change, and he likes feeling like anything he does in this place will stay here. Like it won’t follow him when he leaves, and it might be waiting for him if he ever comes back.

He also likes the extraneous surge of energy shooting through his veins, and the way it gives him confidence and an unhealthy surplus of oxytocin. 

He shakes his sand-colored hair out and combs the gel out of it with his fingers. For the first time since Lisa, he feels worthy of something. Someone. 

He touches Cas – who is audibly wondering what drink he's going to get, how much it'll cost and how he doesn't have any money but he doesn't want to spend Dean’s and other trivialities – on his thickly bundled arm, and opens the heavyset glass door for him. 

“Dean, what – I can open a door-”

“ _ Shhh. _ Be quiet, dammit.” He ushers him through the glossy frame, gently placing his palm on Cas’s lower back and pushing, slightly, just enough to get him to the other side. 

They fall into the chaos of the pub together, like tumbleweeds, and there’s an immediate change in atmosphere. Dean thinks that somewhere in the middle of it their hands might’ve touched, and it surprises him that he doesn’t care. He can smell the alcohol so strongly, as if the very  _ oxygen _ in the bustling place is inebriated, and the expression on Cas’s face tells him that he can, too, and that he doesn’t like it. But Dean would be lying if he said he wasn’t going to get Cas drunk this fine evening, so he ignores the obvious and sits himself down at a table for two.

His thoughts are already muddled enough, but the cacophony of his surroundings makes his brain almost catatonic. Therefore, it’s not his fault when he lets the hot waitress stand there for minutes on end. In fact, he doesn’t notice her at all until she starts trilling her baby-pink fingernails against the faux wood of the table.

(That’s a lie. She had already been doing that, Dean just doesn’t quite take note of it until Cas says his name) 

“Dean,” He whisper-gasps, and the only reason Dean picks up on it is because it sounds ridiculously urgent.

“Mm…Cas, if you know what you want, go ahead and order it for the both of us.” Dean replies nonchalantly. 

The waitress’s name-tag bobbles on her voluptuous figure ( _ Whitney _ , it says), and she bends seductively over Cas. Dean is, in equal parts, highly amused and simultaneously wanting to karate-chop her greedy hands away from his fine ass. 

Although he’d never let himself admit it.

“Tell us what you want, honey.” Her boobs are hovering over his face, for God’s sake, and his skin is just  _ painted  _ red. The hilarity of it wins over, though, and as stubbornly jealous as he is, Dean waits it out because he wants to laugh,  _ so bad. _

“Oh. Oh – We’ll both have, um,” He looks at Dean, forehead creased in frustration, and Dean nods, just because his cheeks burn from restrained entertainment. “Just whiskey.” Cas grins proudly, and Dean watches him realize the proximity of the woman in front of him. “Go on…?” He trails off nervously, and gestures for her to go away like some pretentious sovereign, and she flips around like a hyperactive starling. Twisting her lean torso, though, she meets his eyes one last time before flouncing off again.

“Alright, honey, I’ll be back with the good stuff.” She winks at Cas, and puckers her lips in a short, one-sided smile as she leaves, and Dean can finally breathe again. (As funny as it was, it was a bit painful, as well. And Dean can only assume, really, that it’s not out of anything other than the inelegance of spectating flirtation.)

“That was strange.” Cas wipes his hands on his thighs, like it’ll get rid of the discomfort clearly evident in his stupid blue eyes.

Dean cracks up. Superior, celestial Cas, being overwhelmed by simple, humane, if occasionally lewd, romance. He bends over the table like he’s already wasted, sputtering about inexperience and obscenity, and it’s hardly even that funny, but laughter is a rare gem in his hell-bound life and he’ll be damned if he misses an opportunity. “Yeah, no shit…!” 

“Dean, does this honestly amuse you? She practically assaulted me!”   
“She liked you.”

“I didn’t like her!”

“Why? She’s got all the assets.”

All the lightheartedness is suddenly sucked out of their little table, and as ebullient as the orchestra of bar sounds was before, in a split second it’s too loud and too demanding, and Dean battles the impulse to cover his ears. 

Cas stirs uneasily in his seat, his head poised tragically towards the floor, his eyes conveying some sort of shiny, volatile melancholy. “I don’t know.”

And the sobriety must be getting to both of them, because when Slutty Whitney comes back with the drinks, they both reach for them with the inflamed and repressed despondency of true alcoholics. 

Cas’s shoulders tense up and he holds his breath when she comes over, and Dean makes a big point of glaring at her, and she adjusts her bra strap and hops away with a hurt pout on her face. Dean would usually care, or at least follow her ass with his eyes as she leaves to cater to more responsive customers, but he doesn’t.

He raises his glass steadily, with  _ confidence _ . “To teamwork.”

Cas nods; they drink. 

 

***

 

“Hey, hey – Whitney!”

“Yes, Whitney-”

“Another round.”

“Another?”

“Cas, how can you complain? It probably takes hundreds of these things to get you  _ tipsy _ .”

“Another round, then.” Cas says somewhat defeatedly, and Dean focuses intensely on the woman pouring them each their eighth-or-ninth-or-something shot, like he’s a cyborg and his eyes are machines fighting for HD unpixelated coverage, which of course they’re not but it certainly  _ feels  _ like it. It takes much, much more than three fourths of a dozen quick swallows of hard liquor to get Dean Winchester fucked up, but lately he’s discovered that intoxication is simply a  _ state of mind. _

Ultimately, then, he can act however the  _ fuck  _ he wants and blame it all on substance abuse.

“Cas, could you just be drunk if you wanted to? I mean, as an omnipotent being, you can pretty much just manifest whatever you want, right? Or want to be?” he says, raising his glass and tipping it down his throat swiftly in acknowledgement. He’s always had some retroactive form of ADHD, he feels like, but it’s as if he indulges it whenever he’s drunk.

“I think a foolish, debauched version of myself would be more than just unilaterally destructive. It would be too liberating. Ironic, considering the idiom ‘under the influence’ sounds more…confining than anything else.”

Dean agrees, and disagrees, for different reasons.

“Here’s to big words.” They clink their glasses together and collectively shiver from the artificial, metallic sound it makes, and drink whatever’s left in them, and Dean isn’t paying attention which is why it’s so startling but as soon as their hands are empty again, both of Cas’s are on both of his, light and unsure and lovely – and then he drags them off, and his fingernails are sort of rough and scratch these thin white lines into Dean’s knuckles – and it’s not just  _ lovely _ , it’s  _ so hot.  _

“Dean.”

“Yes, Cas.”

“Don’t you think this place is getting a bit too crowded, for…us? Of course, this is an adequate setting for socializing and the like but – you don't think - there's not something more…pleasurable, that we could partake in-”

Dean looks down, at the fading scrapes that decorate the back of his hands, and he forces himself to erase that stinging phrase from his immediate memory like the said blemishes, because it’s too much to be true.

Because he  _ wants it to be true. _

“What was that?”

“I meant-” the frazzled man sitting opposite Dean gulps and rubs his eyes fiercely, and continues with his sentence as if he’s testing it out. Like he genuinely cares, about how this works, whatever  _ this  _ is. “Is there any sense in – in leaving, maybe?”

He doesn’t look up still but at this point, Dean has to smile, just a little bit, because he can’t fight what’s going on anymore, it’s gotten too obvious. And he never thought, had  _ never even considered  _ it would get this far.

(He has considered it, has gone over it in grandiose detail, actually, and much more than he’d like to admit. It seems to always pop into his thoughts at the most inopportune of moments, like when he’s eating dinner or when he’s trying to read up on some new monster; sometimes, though – and he grins into a napkin – the circumstances wander into his mind when he’s alone in his bedroom in the bunker, and sometimes he lets them, and sometimes, rarely, he’ll say, he purposely brings them to light himself.)

“Now, Cas, don’t be  _ silly _ . It’s a nice place.”

The angel sighs into his lap. 

“You’re going to make me work for it, then.”

Dean chuckles sadistically.

“Fine. Dean, would you  _ care _ to  _ participate _ , with  _ me _ , in the act of inter-”

“Dammit, Cas, you don’t hafta say the fuckin’  _ words _ .”

The angel smiles.

 

***

 

 

They have just spent a half an hour tumbling over each other, the two of them – the lover and the angel himself – and up the stairs, favoring each other’s lips and fondling all the hard-to-reach places and finding tangled resolutions within each other. Cas recalls squeezing the scrappy wooden motel railing so roughly that it crumbled inside his curled fingers, a result of his overexcited angelic-ness. 

He also recalls, once, not too long ago, either, Gabriel asking him if he had the capacity to fall in love with a human – with the lesser race – and he remembers looking down and seeing through to Lucifer and saying nothing, and he remembers Gabriel looking up and saying yes, that  _ he _ already had. 

And he remembers always admiring Gabriel too much, and of mimicking him as a result; and he thinks now that this is the best way he could flatter his memory, is to finally answer that question in a way he would've understood. 

Now, he stands adjacent to the man he answers it with, researching him with his eyes and reveling in the blinding glory. 

He was reluctant to leave him untouched, even for a minute, but Dean said he would want a better angle – and as he watches the scar-riddled human undress, he agrees wholeheartedly. 

It’s nearly impossible to view all of him at once. Every part of him deserves the utmost attention, the grandest magnification. It would take hours to do to him what Castiel wants to do; to kiss every millimeter of his abandoned body; to marvel at each pore; to worship, in its sanctity, the epitome of his father’s creation.

He’s graceful but nonchalant, somehow, and it makes Cas’s heart melt.

Dean slowly pulls the sleeves of his jacket from his shoulders, and kicks off his shoes; slow enough that Cas knows he knows Cas is watching. He pulls his mussed hair (oh yes, Cas did that, and he would again a thousand times over) through his calloused fingers and shrugs, and the seraph can see his abdominal muscles through the sweaty dress-shirt; and with his arm like that there’s a slight  _ v  _ hovering over the belt of his slacks, and maybe it’s his vessel taking over, but Cas’s swollen mouth fills with saliva and the elastic of his own pants seems to strangle his waist like a barrier, or a warning. It has for a while, he realizes.

The omen goes unaddressed, however, as soon as the eighth wonder of the world opens his mouth.

“Gosh, Cas,  _ you _ look like you’re gonna cream yourself.” He says it with carefully filtered sarcasm (Castiel probably looks terrified, he recognizes), but Cas can tell he’s apprehensive. He’s worried, Cas understands, that he’ll hurt him somehow, that he’ll go too far (as he often does) and ruin everything.

“Well, I – I’ve never done this before. Not  _ this _ .” He thinks briefly of his time with the dream-Dean, and how it was so much easier then.

“ _ Well _ , some people do say it’s a sin.”

His eyes sparkle with molecules of laughter, but it’s met with an eerie inanimation, and the two can only stare at each other (without really looking) until it passes.

“ _ Is _ it a sin?”

“I don’t know…how could you expect me to know what is and what isn’t a sin? Dean, look at everything I’ve sacrificed, everything I’ve senselessly thrown away for you and your brother and your  _ species _ – everyone I’ve left behind – and then look at  _ me,  _ and tell me that  _ I  _ know what it is to be holy.” A rippling chasm of grief expands in his stomach, filling his lungs and intestines and riding his spine all the way up to his brain and solidifying, immobilizing him in stone.

“I can’t,” Dean looks down at his socked feet and clicks his tongue against his teeth, and Cas doesn’t understand how his face could be so bare, how it isn’t robbed by the same traitorous, dismayed emotions that flow through his own humanoid veins. “But maybe that’s why we fit so well together, is because neither of us are perfect. Hell, we’re barely likable. We’re all we’ve got, Cas.”

And it’s enough to make him bridge the ravine of distance between them, and throw himself on top of the righteous man, and press his lips against his, and finish unbuttoning and unzipping and  _ tearing off  _ their clothes for himself, because he feels certain now of his predicament, of the fact that he’s  _ in love  _ with Dean.

And from then on they communicate in rough-edged generosity, in the giving of things to each other, and it’s not until they absolutely have to that they resort to inferior avenues of conversation.

“Cas…how far do you want to go?”

His answer is pretentiously clandestine by all logical means, but by the linguistics of infatuation, a prolonged kiss is entirely suitable.

For the sake of clarity, however, he adds gruffly “Far enough.”

Dean chuckles, and as Cas straddles him he can feel the deep, throaty genuineness of the sound resonate around his thighs and Dean’s beating heart. “You’re so  _ damn _ poetic.”

“It’s only fitting.”

Dean’s playful smile disappears, and once again there is the fear of taking it beyond the boundaries, of rejection.

“Yeah, I s’ppose,” Dean says distractedly, and the barely-there validation is infuriating, but there’s no time to consider it because something moves, and there’s friction, and both men are brought back to the reason they are where they are. 

Dean still has pants on and Cas is still trenchcoat-clad and all, but it doesn’t stop him from tracing the grooves between the other man’s muscles affectionately; he’ll never relieve himself of the sensation that although humanity remains as defective and unreliable as ever, it will always prove to be much better than him, than his own kind, in the end. He plays his fingers over soft skin, biceps and pectorals and collarbones, and down the axis of the man’s stomach, sweeping his palm across his navel and wanting so badly to reach that point of no return, and to get there unafraid. He can’t deny his ignorance, but every instinct he has is telling him that now that he’s officially in the situation, he’d better take control of it. Something blankets him then, an encompassment of leadership that he’s been accused of before, but never really saw in himself until now.

“Dean.” He whispers, and closes his eyes. He can feel a wave of paralysis roll through the man underneath him and sink into the cheap motel mattress, and it pleases him that he put it there. He focuses on presentation, and keeps his eyes loosely shut. Carefully, he unties himself from the forlorn trenchcoat and throws it behind him, and ritualistically unhooks each button from its corresponding hole in his shirt; and speaking of holes, the way Dean hungrily follows each motion with his eyes is burning them in Cas’s chest. If Sam were here (and thank God he’s not) he would claim they’ve had eyesex before, but this is different, this is _real_. And as he gets more confident, he gets faster and he wants it more and he lets himself forget the obstacles – and then his shirt hangs open, undone, wavering somehow even in the stagnant and feverous air between them – and he opens his eyes and Dean’s fingers reach out towards him, milliseconds away from shocking his skin with their fervor. In a rush of blood he meets him in the middle there, grabbing his hand and nailing it above his head, pushing it against the headrest, and the human is visibly impressed. And, by the looks of it, a little intimidated. Cas would be lying if he said he wasn’t proud of himself.

With his free hand, he shrugs the rest of his white button-up off of his shoulders and starts on his tie, but a flicker of disappointment in Dean’s eyes makes him falter. “What is it?”

“I don’t know…I, uh, I like the tie, I guess.” He shifts uncomfortably beneath Cas’s ass, and bites the inside of his cheek.

Castiel smirks. “Interesting,” he follows, pronouncing every syllable. He never would’ve anticipated…then again, it would’ve been impossible to anticipate  _ any  _ of this.

There’s still the matter of their pants, though, so Cas catches Dean’s other hand at his side and places it with the first one, above his head, a kinky little curvature flaunted across the pillow and making Dean look  _ oh so pretty. _

“Stay how you are, human.”

“Whatever you say,  _ angel _ .”

Sardonicism. He’ll learn – Cas’ll teach him. 

He inches himself down the hunter’s toned body, gripping the beautiful protruding muscles everywhere he can during his descent, and sliding his hands underneath him and centering himself on the small of his back, his mouth level with his waist. For a few moments he wrings a few groans out of Dean, licking and sucking on his hipbones. He lifts his head and is petrified at first glance by the marks he has made, but is assuaged by the helplessness evident in Dean’s face; a sort of longing that leads him to believe he’s done nothing wrong.

Carefully, he lifts his fingers from their curled impatience beside him and slips one hand just slightly beneath the band of Dean’s suit-slacks, testing the waters.

“Oh,  _ God _ .”

“You can call me Castiel.” He lightly cups the pulsing erection in such close proximity to his mouth, and his comment inspires a tight grin and a furthered sense of desperation in both of them.

“Castiel, please-”

Holy shit, Dean hasn’t called him that in  _ years. _

He tugs on either side of the pants, and they slide down along with a pair of flannel boxers, lubricated by a nervous and lustful sweat that Cas knows envelops them both, collectively.

He pulls a dripping and crimson-tinged cock out of Dean’s pants, and it folds neatly against his stomach; and the combination of oxidation and abrasion is, apparently, enough for Dean to swear obscenely. 

“Ah,  _ fuck _ , Cas,  _ dammit,  _ I need-”

Not that anything else they’re doing isn’t obscene.

It strikes Cas that he really doesn’t have much of an idea what to do with the member sitting so complacently under his nose, but he figures he’s been so successful already that it can’t hurt to just _try._ Besides, the sheer sight of it makes his own hard-on throb with want.

In an opaque flash of pinching revelation, he’s snapped back to being afraid.

“Cas…it’s okay.”

The seraph coils his knees further into his torso and slides down, leaving a grinning kiss on Dean’s inner thigh. It’s simultaneously content and apologetic, and Cas can only hope for forgiveness for anything he does wrong here. Immediate forgiveness, he recognizes, because this is so important. This is how he shows Dean what he means to him.

He inches his head closer to the thing that sucks all of the heat from the room, and all of the thoughts from his brain. It demands his attention at this point, and a second longer of waiting might kill them both.

He teases it portentously, stroking up the shaft of it with his thumb, his forefingers hanging off of it disconnectedly; curiously. 

“ _ Unnngh. _ ” Dean clenches his teeth and squints down at Cas accusingly, his hands wrestling each other in ecstatic calamity above his head. The shared ineloquence is encouraging, and the angel regains his regality as the  _ giver _ , per se.

Cas laughs.

“Shut  _ up _ , Cas!” Dean defends himself breathily, barely even audibly. “Keep doing what you were doing.”

Cas raises himself up on his hands and crawls back up, aligning himself with his lover, until his elbows are flat against the bed on either side of his face and he’s a few atoms away from pressing their lips together yet again. 

Examining the glittering green eyes in front of his own, he bends down the extra millimeter and closes the space between their foreheads, moving his hands so they cup the hunter’s deltoids.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Dean.”

The hunter gulps (Castiel watches his Adam’s apple bob on his throat) and nods, never breaking the intensive blue-on-green eye contact. Satisfied, Cas replaces himself between his legs and tries again.

“Shit, Cas, you’re hot.” Dean pants, now that the space between them isn’t quite as electrically dangerous. Cas smiles, and runs his hand tightly down his dick from the head to his balls, producing beads of thick precum that coat his flesh. Without choosing to, his head darts down and his mouth wraps itself around Dean’s cock, and the only coherent thoughts Cas can think are  _ I want to taste you, Dean _ , and  _ God, you taste so good. _

He finds handholds in the lean ridges of Dean’s external obliques and bows his head up and down, producing a series of positively  _ carnal  _ sounds from the subject at hand. Carefully, Cas shifts the entire dick (and it’s pretty damn big, he realizes, a bit too late) into his mouth, stretching his lips to accommodate to the needy thing between them. Gliding along a half an inch or so at a time, he swirls his tongue wherever he can in the limited space because Dean fills him up  _ good. _

_“Fuck,_ Cas, fuck fuck fuck, _where_ did you learn to do that-”

Making a conscious effort to control his gag reflex, he lets Dean bottom out in his throat and quickly veers him out again, admiring his handiwork. 

“Cas – you’re so good, dammit, it’s so nice just to – just to watch you, for fuck’s sake, you’re a miracle.” _ Beautiful.  _ He smiles. Such nice words to hear, even if they’re not true.

With the two-seconds of freedom he is given, he realizes that his own cock is likely to  _ explode _ , soon, and the upheaval in his trousers is seemingly colossal. It seems impossible to get any harder, he’s ready and crying for anything that gets thrown at him, but he can wait. Turning his eyes to Dean, though, he sees that  _ he _ can’t, that he’s sweating and gasping and probably close to the edge.

(And he didn’t think he could get any harder, but here he is, watching Dean and congealing like a fucking rock in the process)

In a flurry of grandiosity and Dean pleading for him to  _ don’t stop now, Cas, please, not now –  _ he suctions the engorged dick into his mouth again and swallows down on it as it glosses through his throat, pulling it in and out and back again, fisting the base with one hand and stroking his balls gently with the other, working up to a fast, needy pace that tells him Dean is hovering over his release.

“Cas, baby, you’re tight as all hell, holy fuck-

“Ah,  _ ahhh,  _ Cas, I’m gonna come,  _ god  _ you’re so good-”

And then the most frantic, pleasure-smothered moan and a looming atmosphere of imminence as Dean calls his name one last time, and Cas just wants to give him  _ everything. _

“Cas…!” He bucks, soaking, into Castiel’s mouth and pulls out, smattering Cas’s hair and then his own stomach with white-hot climax. “Cas…” his hand is clenching the angel’s black hair, and Cas strains his eyes upward to watch him smile lovingly and close his long lashes in resignation. He stays like that for a while; they both do, Castiel resting on the dip in his stomach and Dean lazily petting his head; until the breathing slows, and Dean falls asleep, and Cas is left alone.

 

***

 

The angel Cas, it appears, has an affinity for observing humanity – and as he continues to deprecate himself with use of the third person, he thinks that it can be narrowed down to the observation of one human in particular, the one he lays with now. 

He’s watched Dean sleep before. Many times before, sometimes inquisitively, sometimes dejectedly, sometimes without permission (more than sometimes), and a lot of the time without anything at all; simply because he has nothing better to do.

Tonight, unusually, he has other things on his mind.

He could stay here – he wants to – and stroke Dean’s velvety hair, and press his forehead to the man’s so as to whisper unintelligible truths into his lovely face, and apply feathery kisses to the apex of his nose at intervals of something like eleven seconds; but first and foremost he doesn’t want to wake him, and secondly, as much as he’d like to ignore it, there’s a certain burning between his thighs that’s different than any other persuasion he’s experienced before. 

Carefully, he uproots himself from his sanctuary, wrapped around the blissful hunter’s enthralling heat like a flower around a trellis. The sudden cold makes his flesh crawl, and goosebumps cover his skin in an invisible carpet of adrenaline.

_ How odd _ , he considers dismissively (there are more important things to deliberate).  _ This has never affected me before. _

For the second time that night, he is brought back to the djinn’s world of uninterrupted mortality, and how while everything there had had a due date – a death sentence, a doomsday – there had been so much to  _ live  _ for.

Now that he has Dean, he could live (he avoids the slew of cliché adverbs that typically accompany the word, because with all the apocalypses they encounter they is no such thing as  _ vivaciously _ or  _ optimistically  _ or even  _ freely _ ) , but he won’t have him for very long; Dean  has  made sure Cas knows that, and the seraph isn’t sure that their recent activities have changed anything, but he’s not going to ask.

He just wants to get as close as he can to making Dean  _ happy. _

Thoughts of his best friend swallow his brain and, with a last glance towards his peaceful man , he walks the few long strides to the motel bathroom, swinging the door open as fast as he can to prevent creaking and sliding down the periwinkle-blue tile, the biting frigidity of it injecting the nape of neck with frost.

The significance of this is that with the hyperborean conditions of the ugly restroom, Cas’s heated erection stands out, straining against the black of his fitted pants. 

Nervously – but more uneasy about the freeze reaching his bare ass than anything else – he slides his pants off and into his hand and prudently bundles them into a sweaty and soon-to-be-crumpled package beside him, and after that he can only stare at the red aching thing towering against his navel. 

He’s never touched himself before although there’s been plenty of times when he could’ve, and now he conjures up a list of imaginative benefits as to why he definitely  _ should’ve _ , because he delicately flutters his palm over the tip of his cock and it feels strange, and extraterrestrial, (although Castiel himself is not of this world) but admittedly, spectacular.

He wraps a hand around his dick and gets shocked by his vessel’s response, which is to spread his legs and groan slightly, and his other hand flies to his mouth to stifle himself. Quickly, though, he learns that it feels better that way, with his thick thighs hanging open wide and bouncing rhythmically with his thrusts as he slumps against the dewy wall, surrendering himself to his libido.

He forgets all about being quiet, and before he can help himself an iridescent euphony of Sounds That Should Really Be Censored has already exited his lungs, and he can actually feel something waiting to come out of him, something that builds up at the bottom of his stomach and spreads powerfully throughout his body. A staggering wavelength of endorphins pushes thoughts of Dean against the shore of his mind, and he doesn’t waste a single one. He wishes the man were here now, touching him and coaxing him along a precipice of ecstasy; his hands on his chest and his throat and his perspiring hairline, and the corners of his mouth where his upper lip meets the bottom one – pushing and rubbing and kissing things that ought to be kissed-

“Cas?”

The angel turns his neck against the wall, his hand still on his cock, but no longer in motion, and the first thing he sees are two ink-flooded, pale-green orbs.

It takes him a moment to comprehend the rest of Dean, but by the time he’s finished scanning the entirety of his profoundly naked body, the hunter has spoken again.

“Cas, what are you doing?” Dean’s eyes widen and his shoulder blades arch back, his hand sliding down the white door-frame.

“Clearly, I didn’t want to wake you up – which brings me to ask; why are you awake, Dean?” Castiel is quite impatient, but not necessarily to resume his previous activities; he wants to assume them again, of course, but he wants to do it with the dumbstruck man in front of him, whose jaw remains rudely dropped even as Cas thinks all the way through such thoughts.

“Well, damn, Cas, you were – you were kinda loud,” Dean says accusingly. Cas could trace the beeline of blood from his brain to his crotch.

“How long have you been standing there?”

Dean looks straight down, his tousled hair sticking up everywhere on top of his head, highlighted in the industrial-like lighting of the tiny bathroom. “Um. The first time you said my name.”

_ So somewhere within the first few minutes. _

“It’s nice to know you appreciated the show, then.”

“No, Cas – that’s not what I meant, why are you so sensitive, man-”

Cas stands up, edging his heel against the merge of the wall and the floor, swinging around Dean until he’s leaning opposite him on the other side of the doorframe. Standing there together, they fill all but a few static grains of space between the sturdy beams of peeling wood that keep them upright. “That’s not what I meant, either,” Cas bites back, gravel chafing across the frequencies of his cracking voice. One of his hands is still waiting, charged but immobile, at the base of his cock, and the other slung across his shoulder casually. He thinks, while he talks, about how picturesque they must look here, crowded raw and nude against the dull, stained pillars behind them, full of each other and still wanting more. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” He trills quietly, stretching his arm out and grazing the far-left side of Dean’s chest.

Dean looks down and inhales sharply at the touch, and whispers, “I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”

The angel squints pensively and pushes his whole body against Dean, so that what he says is heard. He presses his nose on that of the other man’s, and both of their eyes are closed. “Of course I do.”

Dean sags into him, his words coming out as if they would’ve combusted, had they been on his tongue any longer. “I want you, too.”

“Maybe we should do something about that.” Cas’s face drifts into the crook of Dean’s neck, and he breathes deeply into his comforting manliness; the smell of alcohol and sweat and robust, bitter muskiness.

“Cas, I want you to – to fuck me.” Dean treads on the words cautiously, like they’re spiked, and holds his breath. “Can you do that?”

Cas bows his head down even farther, dropping his forehead so it rests in the dip between the hunter’s collarbones. “Anything,” he says. “Anything for you, Dean, always.”

 

***

 

“Cas, I don’t have any lube.” The esteemed hunter trembles fiercely, and looks like he might cry – which is understandable, considering they’ve both waited so long for this. 

“Does it matter?” Castiel inquires, cocking his head. He doesn’t recognize the term, and assumes it must be idiomatic, but he’d like to get all he can out of this, even if it means memorizing exaggerated bedroom slang for the sake of it.

“Of course it fucking matters,” he tears through a gentle-chartreuse-colored bag that matches his eyes, assumably looking for the mentioned substance, “Aw, Cas, I hate to yell but I just – I can’t believe I would’ve forgotten it…” 

Cas sits on the bed behind him, and at this time he folds his hands over Dean’s, the ridges of his spine jutting into the hard muscle of Cas’s stomach. “It’s alright. There’s no way you could’ve known.”

He can't see Dean’s face, but he can feel the hunter tensing up and imagines that it contorts in discovery. Problem-solving skills, something God gave the humans long ago. He waits for Dean to speak, because he knows he will; and when he does, Cas can feel it echoing throughout his entire skeletal system. 

(Another thing God gave the humans, in the very beginning)

“Cas…what if we used that stuff, from your wings…” Dean scratches at his knee and looks to his side, turning his ear to Castiel, who is undeniably startled by this unorthodox.

“I’m surprised you remembered.” He wriggles his hands from around the other man and wraps them around his bare chest, plagued by a sudden drop in temperature. Dean shrugs his shoulders and Cas doesn’t want to disappoint him, not again, and in actuality Cas would gladly oblige to this stupendous idea – but theoretically, it reeks of danger. “I’m not sure, Dean. It sounds...inherently blasphemous.”

The degree of the room falls again as the Winchester laughs; it’s a sweet sound, but it’s turned saccharine, and to Castiel it sounds cruel, dull and virile. “Are you kidding?”

“Dean, please…” Cas holds himself tighter, and the atmosphere seems darker and more unsure than before, and it’s another thing to  _ hate _ himself for, that he’s built an impalpable brick wall of his own sickening doubt. 

How could he allow himself to doubt  _ Dean _ ?

Suddenly, everything feels hesitant and uncertain.

“Cas, what could be more blasphemous than what we’ve already done?”

The angel’s cheeks redden in shame. Without speaking, he unfolds his massive wings. He can feel exactly how cheap they are, how ruined, and he hopes at the very least that his hunter likes what he sees.

Castiel answers his own question as he watches Dean’s face stupefy into suppressed admiration, and more pressingly, concern – once again, like last time, the seraph has revealed not his own pair of appendages but a mirage, a lucid and alluring illustration of their past glory. Like wearing makeup, or hair extensions or flattering clothing; but Castiel feels not only pretty, in a twisted respect, but also powerful, and functional, for the first time since the last time this happened. 

His esteem is tested, however, when Dean’s eyelashes flutter lightly and his tongue swells with words. 

“Cas…the real you…?” It’s an excellent question. Cas tastes acid bile frothing in the back of his throat, takes a deep breath and shoves the illusion away, in an elusive corner where he hopes he will never have to find it again. 

***

 

[He won’t.]

 

***

 

“Wow,” The expression is trite and kitsch, but emerging from the delta of Dean’s lips it sounds merciful. “Shit, Cas.” The second phrase is more pathetic, regarding the way it sways with ruth in a temperate psychological breeze of dolor. At least, Cas gets this impression. He doesn't want to look at Dean’s face, even though they're facing each other now and all he would have to do is lift his head. 

“Dean, I told you days ago I don't want your pity.” 

The other man’s face morphs into uncalculated defensiveness, and his brow furrows in opposition. “Cas, what the hell? I don't pity you – if anything, man, I fucking  _ envy  _ you. Your wings…” His expression melts, and puddles into something like yearning. 

_ When did we become adversaries in this? I thought he understood he can't rely on me to be perfect for him… _

“They’re amazing.” 

Cas’s flesh is tormented by an epidemic of rouge pigmentation; he fucking  _ blushes _ , he really does. “…I don’t want to argue with you.” If anyone could ever make him change his mind so quickly, it's the man in front of him. 

Dean smirks wildly. An attempt at his usual poker face fails histrionically and the smug short-lipped simper turns into a full-on grin, accompanied by a rich chuckle that now feels less threatening and more cathartic; like the sun warming your back on a listless I’ve-lost-track-of-what-day-it-is summer morning. 

He smiles back at his best friend, and it feels good. He breathes in for almost twenty seconds, with a complete ignorance towards the actual capacity for oxygen in his lungs, and exhales a heavy, inarticulate stream of word scrambles fit for a muffled and staticky survival radio. 

“Dean, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be…” 

The ephemeral blithe ends, as it was bound to, and the smile fades delicately, dissipating into the air like an apparition. “Cas,” Dean growls, not seductively or carnivorously or anything even relatively pornographic that Cas would've expected – more like  _ irate _ , in a sad and condescending sort of demeanor – “I want you to want this, goddammit.” 

The angel twitches, released fleetingly from his usual unencumbered stoniness, and replies very quietly. He hardly recognizes his own voice, it’s so low. “I've wanted this since I met you, Dean. I've wanted this – no, you’re one of – and I hate to say it, because we have priorities, but you are one of the things I want…most.” 

Dean’s fingers clench the sheets in taut fists and seem to radiate anger; but upon further inspection, Cas can see that his pupils have been blown into disproportion with lust. 

He says nothing, at least not for a few minutes. And Cas is counting. 

“Me, too.”

Castiel’s wings flare madly (he can feel the feathers bounce elastically off of the walls to his left and right), and he  _ is _ as ready as he’ll ever be – but only because he is so, so  _ fucking  _ ready. 

Dean reaches out, glaring dazedly at something directly behind Cas, and when his hand makes contact with his grace he shivers. 

Sighing lightly, he wraps a fold in the bedspread around his knuckles like a tourniquet and squeezes it into white knots as Dean spills the maroon plumage between his fingers, trailing a chemical burn similar to dry ice in his wake. As trenchant as the chime of a church bell, Cas can hear Dean muttering praise under his breath. Words he doesn't think he's ever even heard from the man before, terms of submissive and awed endearment acting as a buffer between soft anatomical id and uncomfortable overthinking. It's an act of passion, an act of what could be called gratitude; and for Cas, it's an act of rebellion. 

Dean massages his way through the under-preened appendages, and years of decoding his body language and sensing his thoughts lead Cas to the understanding that he's a working up a foreplay, sort of, before he gets to what he wants. It’s a wise decision, because Cas’s dubiousness lingers, balled up into a remote island in a tight place in his chest, and wishing it away hasn't done anything for him so far. But things change – and as Dean transfers his eye contact from Cas’s wings to his face, the tension and the added stimulus of the man’s hands floating through rows and columns of integral and tangibly soft quills, Cas’s quills, and applying strain and duress to all the right places (he’s doing so well! It’s as if he’s done this before, or at least strategized it in his mind sometime Cas must not have been eavesdropping in it), Cas theorizes that they've changed for the better and will continue to do so. A high-pressured scratchiness in his throat forces him to speak, and as gruff as it feels coming out, phonetically it sounds clear, keen, and magisterial. “That feels,” he says, more to himself than Dean, “That’s...not...enough.” It's devoid entirely of the typically artistic and driven syntax that generally flows from his mouth, but he's not in a typical or general situation; and besides that, it comes out confident, and that's all Dean needs. 

The hunter ups his game, teasing his way through the angel’s grace, scooting closer to Cas (almost chest-to-chest) so as to enlarge his sphere of influence; handling each inferno-colored feather in its individuality, stroking up each one and plucking at the stunning white ends of the them, just enough to get Cas’s jaw to drop open a few millimeters and hang there – his boyish and brunette almost-curls framing his face in perspiration and his eyelids drooping in what, under any other circumstances, could be addressed as a need for sleep. But it’s a need for something else, Castiel recognizes, a need for something far more complicated and massively consequential. A confessed victim of ignorance, he thinks that being on the receiving end of this is potentially much more psychologically racking than the alternative. He's distracted from said analysis, however. 

“Cas,” Dean breathes, his eyes flicking away and back for a fraction of a second, as if they can't stand to be anywhere but. “It’s like fire.” He folds a pinion between his fingers as if it’s the winning hand at a game of poker, and his comment is a little confusing, even for a somewhat-omniscient being. 

“Excuse me?” 

Dean snorts, assumably at the strange-sounding politeness in Cas’s tone, and shrugs. “Your wings. It’s like someone melted orange and red crayons together and, like, paint-balled them into the sky. Every time I move my hands, it looks like you're on fire.” 

Cas rolls his wrist joint pensively and frowns in impatience. “Does it worry you?” 

Dean smiles lopsidedly, his eyes sparkling; he nods subtly as he speaks, implicit in what he says. “It is definitively and corporeally hot.” He tugs at a handful of feathers for emphasis, and Castiel gasps before he even has a chance to beam back at him flusteredly.

Cas pants lightly, barely scraping together any breath as he practically hyperventilates – Dean has at long last gotten to what he started out with the intention of getting, digging into the glands buried in the ethereal flesh on Cas’s back. The seraph can feel the sweet self-cleaner oozing from the damp crevices between his feathers, and the sigh spilling out of his lungs is never quite executed due to the catching in his throat. Unexpectedly, though, it ends, and Castiel is left with a blunt, cramping shudder that harrows his entire skeleton like a cold wind. 

“Keep your hands on me.” He says, and looks at Dean’s resulting pout curiously, but realizes it's half-hearted; the man is clearly distracted. Drawing his hands forward, the hunter holds them up so Castiel can see. 

“…Okay.” His hands are covered in the thick liquid, dying them a sheer, gooey mahogany color. Cas looks at them, stupefied, as they reach towards his dick. The second it touches him, he is startled so badly he yells. 

“Dean!” The single-syllable name still manages to jumble in his mouth, and he catches the focused man’s eyes. They stare at each other, and as Dean moves his oil-coated hand up and down Cas’s cock, there is complete silence. 

It feels  _ so good _ , Cas doesn't even have the brainpower to storm up better adjectives. The glandular secretion acts as the perfect lubrication, wet and warm and slippery, gliding determinedly across Cas’s genitals. Dean thumbs the head of his dick lightly and swipes a glistening finger over his slit, forcing Cas to break the silence with another cry. 

“Cas? You ready?”

The addressed angel rolls his eyes back into his head involuntarily. All he can do is nod. 

Forgetting that his hands are dripping in Essence of Castiel, Dean caresses the skin right below Cas’s eyebrow, his own forehead wrinkling in concern. “Do you even know what you’re doing?” 

The angel snorts, and shakes his head. 

“C’mon, I’ll help you.” The hunter tugs on a strand of Cas’s chocolatey hair and flops onto his stomach in excitement. Turning his head back to Cas and smiling shyly, he kicks his legs a little bit. It’s weird to see him so vulnerable, and it’s even weirder to see him so enthused. It’s refreshing, and inspirational; the angel can only watch with affectionate interest. 

“I've never done this before, but it can't be that difficult. I know you probably don’t even know where to start…I’m sorry, man. You’ve screwed girls before, though. It’s not that different, right? You’ve got a dick, I’ve got a hole you can put it in…if you want, I guess you can treat me like I’m a girl.” Dean looks up at him through his lengthy lashes, his shapely and gorgeous ass like a fucking beacon of hope in the filmy confusion of sex. Castiel totally sees the appeal of it, of ramming into each other until they can’t think anything outside of _ohmygod_ and _more_ , and of becoming one thing. He barely registers what Dean says, but he knows enough to be proud of him for saying it. Just because he never has, and it’s about time.

“Dean, show me your hands again.” Cas’s voice is cool and collected, and finally he feels like he has a purpose and can fulfill it, even if it’s just for however long this is going to last. The hunter rolls onto his side and throws his arms forward, palms up to display the balmy salve still hanging from them like half-dried wax. Carefully, Cas entwines their fingers and then prudently extracts his own, collecting some of the ochre liniment as it beads translucently on his skin. From there, he gestures at Dean’s wide eyes for him to lay back down, and once he’s nestled complacently in his former position, Castiel acts. He wants to let this last, but the sensations brewing within him push him towards zenith with the power of a cement truck; so he contents (and restricts) himself to simply trailing his forefinger down the split of Dean’s spine, all the way to the small of his back, and slackening with the suspense of it. Finally, emphatically, he slips down further, between the firm coils of strength that represent Dean’s buttocks; and with his inconveniently colossal wings convulsing in exhilaration, he spreads them apart and admires the flexing light-pink ring of muscle there.

Dean moans.

“ _ Proceed _ , Castiel. I don’t have all day,” he grunts, digging his elbows into the mattress. He’s obviously going for sarcasm, but Cas can tell that it’s insistence, incognito.  

“Yes, you do.” He rebuts, like it’s a reminder or even a threat.

He needs him so much.

Everything he does, everything he's ever done, has been because he needs this man. He dangles his fingers over the puckered hole and pushes them in, a direct response to his fevered thoughts. It's therapeutic, the way Dean whines, crescendoing briefly from high to low in an unconventionally euphonic sonata, his freckles standing out against his flushed skin. 

They both make noises as Cas gears them up for the real action, thrusting a growing number of fingers into Dean’s ass; Cas mostly because just seeing what he is (Dean coming apart underneath him) is more than enough. 

Eventually, though, after a few minutes of the hunter groping the pillow in front of him like it's an anchor and asking,  _ pleading  _ for more, Cas aligns himself with Dean’s entrance and slides in steadfast, falling for the compelling argument of greedy captivation. 

“F- _ fuck _ , Dean!” He can't stop himself from yelling, because he has no reason not to and also it's so amazing, amazingly tight. Dean can only sigh, Cas’s cock filling him up and blasting the breath right out of him. 

The angel climbs forward, his hands grabbing for any sort of stability, whether it's Dean’s shoulder blades or his hair, until he's balls-deep. He stays there for a hot second, trying as hard as he can not to immediately come, because lord know he's so inexperienced but he's not ready to let Dean fucking  _ know  _ that. 

“Move, dammit!” 

Cas whimpers in defense and maneuvers out and back in again, familiarizing himself with this feeling of lightheaded and casual ecstasy, making sure he's doing it right. 

And it takes a few times before he realizes that he's overanalyzing the situation, that he should just let himself  _ feel.  _ (And he doesn't even realize it on his own, Dean has to prod him and tell him to go faster in a broken, hoarse voice but yes, he gets it) So, based on this hypothesis, he loses control of himself – an uninformed decision but a working one, all the same, and Dean seems to  _ love  _ it. He starts to stop thinking and reverts to a primitive and more appreciative version of himself, one where incessantly slamming into Dean Winchester is nothing more than what he was created to do, rolling his own hips and clutching onto the hunter’s, his breath rattling animally all the while. 

In a less affected state of mind, it would be very funny to Castiel how it all unfolded so rapidly. Not that he would laugh, but something inside him would be amused. It all traces back to those first seven days, that Castiel would think. Where humanity was given perseverance towards its desires, and intractable gratefulness when they were finally obtained. 

And, Cas has obtained Dean in every manner of the word, on top of him and fucking into him like they'll both die if he doesn't. It's not a surprise, then, how it doesn't take them very long at all to feel the onslaught of orgasms in their stomachs. 

“Cas…fuck, sweetheart…!” Dean swears like a sailor when he's turned on, and Cas is eternally thankful for this golden opportunity to discover that about him. “I think I might come-”

“Dean, it’s okay, I want to see it…” The last words dangle from the rest of the sentence, deeper and more of a struggle than the assembly of flustered letters that accompany them. Dean huffs and in one swift movement reaches over his shoulder, grips Cas’s hand from its clamp on his back and moves it to his dick, which thrums with potential, dripping with precum. Keeping up with his own rhythm of headstrong  _ in and out and back again _ , he pumps the man’s cock, barely reaching the tip of it from his position; moaning loudly as Dean’s ass contracts around him in unkempt titillation. 

For the second time that night, Cas’s seraph-senses get overwhelmed with brewing kinetic energy stemming directly from Dean like the man is nuclear, a dynamic fluctuation in the chemistry surrounding them. It flashed by too quickly the last time, but now as Dean spits Cas’s name in utter need and heaves himself back onto Cas’s dick, there's no mistaking the weighty aura of beauty that surrounds him. The lighter hairs on the hunter’s hairline gleam with perspiration and stick to the sides of his face, and the rest of it sticks up all over the place as though electrically charged. Cas can't directly see Dean’s luminous green eyes, but when he closes his own they are branded into the back of his eyelids, twinkling at him and invigorating him with a zombified reverence for the man they belong to.  

It spurs him on and toward his own climax. Just  _ seeing  _ him. 

“Dean…my…”

“I’m yours, Castiel.” 

Dean is the first to come, messing all over the bed as Cas drives into him, wet and thick. There's a crack in the space-time continuum when he does so, and the angel is afraid to let go; but it only takes another instant before everything Dean has taught him in the last few hours plays back in his head, and he's convinced that he can handle it, and what comes after. 

It is earth-shattering; Cas blows his load but that's not all that happens, his limbs go rigid where they are and he has to stop himself from assuming his true form, in all its terrible, torn glory. There's a bright white light that stings in his ears, and the sensation of falling and his enormous wings solidifying and his vessel being too shrunken and scrawny to hold them, so they break off, shattering like porcelain, crashing to the ground in shards of sunset-colored seaglass.  

When he looks behind him, and then on the floor, there is nothing. 

Curtly raided of all his strength, he pulls out and tosses himself onto his back behind Dean, shaking his head and trying to remember what he's done. 

Again, there is the furor of having lost something that makes him who is, and he doesn't understand it until the exhaustion fully penetrates him, bleeding him dry of any difference between him and his Winchester. 

He is human. 

 

***

 

“Cas?”

His name being asked to him like it’s a question is something that occurs too often. It’s quite possible that this is because he’s too often infected by situations like these, with befuddlement and turmoil bouncing off the walls of his skull.

He claws at his ears, trying to undo the ruin of his own grace, shutting his eyes so tightly he can still see the blinding landscape of white that shut them in the first place.

“Cas? What’s going on? Are you okay?!” Cas opens his eyes like he’s a jump-scare in a horror movie, quick and clean, and as his paroxysmal vision dilates into focus he sees the man who calls him by his name as if it is a prayer.  _ That won’t work anymore _ , he wants to say.

Instead, he lets the boy fawn over him and crowd his naked body with foolish concern. His voice is low and comforting, so much so that Castiel almost slips into sleep – but Dean (he remembers now,  _ Dean _ , and then the rest of what he can remember swamps his brain and he hasn’t the energy to brick them up or assembly-line them through his analytical conscience; he’s left with the hazardous method of simply leaving them where they are and hoping they don’t fade again) doesn’t let him; no, he grasps the now-human’s face in his meaty hands and shakes him until he jolts into wakefulness. 

The first thing he notices is that outside the window, the sky is pale pink with dawn and bruised with cerise clouds the likes of Michelangelo. A medieval word pops into his head to describe it, proving that at the least he still has his alchemical wisdom.  _ Insanguinato. _

“Dean?” What a hypocrite he is, complaining about the name-questions and then asking one himself. 

He blinks, and there is the hunter, tall and anxious and guilty.

“Cas? Are you awake?”

“I think I’m bleeding, Dean.” The Winchester’s eyes widen, and Cas adds to the whirlpool of scheming guilt dogging his psyche: the sex, or whatever it was that the two of them shared, will now be contaminated with this dreadful event until they’re both corpses in the ground; which for Cas will consequently be much, much sooner than it would have been before.

“Where?” The man has spent his entire life training for such emergencies. Cas gives up his body to him entirely (it’s not like he had much of a reign over it anyway) and gestures weakly behind him. Dean rolls him over and cups his shoulders, inspecting the palpitating and  _ very much mortal  _ skin that covers his torso. When the righteous man skims his fingertips across his spine, it feels like being burned alive and drowned and hung and stoned all at the same time. In his imagination, that is where the wound is, spurting pus and blood and tarry shame from the bones of what were once feathers and are now open-ended nerves, sparking with embers of electricity the color of the djinn’s eyes and emanating ozone. He shrieks in agony and Dean stumbles, scuttling away from the anguish like a frightened insect. The torture ceases and Cas is completely bare, save the tears on his cheeks.

“You’re not. Do you want to tell me what the hell is going through your mind right now?” Dean is breathing unevenly, exhaling for far too long and not compensating with enough oxygen, but he tries to disguise it with an absence of calamity.

“I think my wings – they might as well have  _ exploded _ , Dean, there were – pieces everywhere – and I’m not an angel anymore, and none of this would’ve happened without  _ Rose _ , but what was I thinking-” He loses himself in the ludicrous explanation, and Dean crawls back up to him to silence him, thank god.

“Hey,” he says, and it seems impossible but maybe his calm is the real thing; “It couldn’t have just disappeared, am I wrong? Conservation of energy or some shit…your grace was energy, it had to go somewhere, and we’ll get it back. We will, we have to, Cas, I’m so goddamn sorry but we can do it, right? It won’t be hard. We’ve done harder fucking things, lord knows it…” and it’s immediately revealed that it might be the real thing, but Dean tries to convince himself more than anyone. 

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.” The chaos pooling in Dean’s expression grows into a churning sea of panic, swallowing any peace there was.

“Well then God’ll handle it, won’t he? He has before, he brought you back all those times and now he could do it again!”

“I’m not dead yet, Dean, and my father has no reason to do so, or even if he did, no way of knowing that this has happened.”

Dean looks at him strangely, the way he looked at him the first time they ever even saw each other. “Y’know, I never thought I’d say this to you but I need you to give me something to work with, Cas.” He fists his hands in his hair, a portrait of madness. “Some optimism. You’re killing me, man.”

Cas looks down. “I have nothing.”

“Damn right you have nothing,” Dean mutters, and it breaks his heart almost as much as the sacrilege broke his halo, “How did this even happen?”

“I didn’t know it would, I swear, I wasn’t thinking straight and I let myself disobey…again; laying with a human is one of the most primitive forbiddances of heaven, and I disobeyed it.” 

Dean slaps the mattress with such force that the whole thing wobbles, and gets up and puts on his clothes. It’s a small act of defiance, but it’s spiteful. “Dammit, Cas, couldn’t you have just told me to stop? I would’ve, I may be batshit crazy for you but I would’ve been able to control myself if I’d’ve known that  _ this- _ ” he motions around the room – “would’ve happened!”

“I didn’t want you to.” Cas stares at his human hands sheepishly. “I would’ve done the same thing if I was presented now, again, with the same dilemma. We’re equals now, Dean. As much as I am going to…miss my powers, I believe this was bound to happen.” It’s too difficult to raise his eyes from the human lines in his human palms, so he doesn’t. “What did you mean when you said that you’re ‘batshit crazy’ for me?”

Dean glares at him and opens his mouth like he's going to answer, but then closes it and shakes his head in obvious disapproval. He loops his tie, and shrugs on his suit jacket, and lobbing a pile of miscellaneous clothing at Cas, turns around and steps towards the door. “Get dressed, we’re getting out of here. Let’s go talk to that damn sheriff.”

Reluctantly, the former (ex) angel follows.

 

***

 

“Shouldn’t we do research first, or something? You tell me, Dean, I’m not the expert.”

[ _ Dean rolls his tongue in his mouth, using it to blockade the passage of dialogue; it’s weird to think of  _ himself _ as the one without a filter when Cas has been that ever since they met each other, but it’s a fitting title when he has to genuinely sojourn the words ‘you aren’t anything anymore’ from absconding his chapped lips. _

_ And that’s not to say that he only felt things for Cas because he was an angel; it’s that this is a setback the likes of which he has suffered before, and is exceptionally sick and tired of. _ ]

Cas waits exhaustedly for a response from Dean, trailing him the way a young child might abusively trail a patchy teddy-bear behind them as they walk up the stairs to have their evening bath. Except they are going  _ down _ the stairs, the motel stairs, and he is not a teddy-bear, he is a man – with average man-blood flowing through his veins, and an average man-head on his shoulders, and an average man-lifespan; nothing extraordinary about him now, and he knows it. Ever since he was laser-beamed into a mortal (and it’s only been a short few minutes, by the way) it’s like all the days he has spent as an angel with his eyes wide open have been demanding compensation in the form of a good night’s rest, but it is neither night nor can he rest. Such is the life.

Dean speaks, but it’s not directed at Cas; it’s a spiel that ricochets off the walls of the empty corridor, seeking the ears of anyone but.

It’s quite invalidating:  _ what in the hell _ kind of reason does  _ Dean _ have to be angry?

“Yeah, you’re right, but I had to leave that room. We’ll find ourselves a nice little cyber café and put some notes down on this bitch. I think I might have an idea, anyway.” Dean pushes open a door milky with fingerprints and dilapidated sticker-adhesive, and Cas follows suit. 

He leans forward, listening for a continuation of this declaration, but none comes.

“Excuse me for asking,” he says acerbically, “were you going to tell me anything more about this conjecture of yours, or was I supposed to read your mind?”

It’s cold outside today, and as the hunter unlocks the impala the sigh he emits freezes and hangs dryly, strung from invisible puppet strings in the sky, long after he has opened and slammed closed the driver’s seat door. “ _ Yes _ , Cas!” He retorts, “you are. Up until now you probably would’ve been able to.”

Cas rolls his eyes. 

 

***

 

They manage to grab one of those barstool tables at a Starbucks with decent service, but Cas can’t help thinking that if Sam were with them they’d probably have three bars at the damn hardware store across the street.

He misses Sam, and not just because of his habit of magnetizing wifi to him even in the middle of a vacant lot at midnight. Frankly, it’s been less than an hour, and he misses  _ talking _ to people. In the car, Dean had explained to him that he’d heard about a monster of Greek-mythology origin that ‘juices hearts and chugs the blood’, and that maybe if they could read into the lore a little more they could figure out why it was going after pregnant women. More nonsensical comments, and then how they really ought to get to researching, usually they would know what the fuck they’re up against by now. (It’s mildly paraphrased, but Cas imagines Dean saying it again and thinks he’s probably got it down.)

Ruefully, they seat themselves on either side of the table, Cas with John’s old and in-all-likelihood-useless-for-this-purpose journal, Dean with a laptop. Having gone through the given documents many a time before, he spends most of his time observing Dean, up until the Winchester mentions to him that it’s ‘rude to stare’ and holds up his middle finger in what is assumably revenge. After that Cas just orders a triple-shot ( _ “what’s the strongest coffee you’ve got?” _ ) hot sixteen-ounce Americano, blowing on it to cool it down and twiddling his thumbs while Dean does the work.

It gives him time to think, which is a blessing and a curse. He produces a sum, in his head, of ways his broken (and already deemed unfixable) grace could affect his future:

-for the most part, he will no longer be actively pursued by heaven, whether it is as a leader or a fugitive;

-he is human, which insinuates human endurance, something he will have to build from the ground up; learning how to brush his teeth and flush a toilet and make his way in the world, for instance;

-the Winchesters will either give up on him entirely, or provide a makeshift pair of wings to protect him with until he can elevate himself to their status as hunters.

There are more effects, of course, the possibilities are endless – but those are the three primary colors, per se, of his affliction. 

He’s just begun to brainstorm sub-categories when Dean suggests that he’s found something, and has the ex-seraph take out a fresh piece of paper and a pencil like he’s in a damn high school history class.

“Okay, so get this – are you writing? Write this down... _ no _ , Cas, don’t write ‘get this’ down, I swear on everything holy, I will shove that stick of graphite up your ass – listen to me. I looked it up and the best fit I could find for that much of a mess, because you know, werewolves may not be Mr. Clean but what we saw back there was definitely not a werewolf – anyway, they’re called Lamiae; or Lamia, in singular. Which is great news, because Sam and I ganked one of ‘em a while back. It says here that according to Greek mythology, they have a thing for kids because their ancestor the queen of Libya had her own with almighty Zeus, and his wife got pissed and made her literally eat them. Ew. So, in short, she wants the young’uns because she was forced to down hers. Alright…doesn’t make much sense but it’s not really relevant, I don’t think. What does matter is wiping her off the face of the earth…it was a little hectic last time around, but now it should be easier because we actually know what to do.” He scoffs. It’s the most he’s said to Cas since this morning.

Cas writes down  _ Lamiae/Lamia  _ and underlines it idly several times. “And what would that be?”

“Oh. Well, it’s supposed to be a silver knife blessed by a priest but that didn’t work so good for the other one. I say we Molotov the fucker with some rosemary and salt and we should be riding into the sunset.” He blushes, for some reason.

Cas doesn’t see a purpose for writing any of this down when it’s so plainly burned into Dean’s memory, but he does anyway. Dean mentions that they should get this over with, and when he doesn’t ask for his damn  _ assignment _ Cas just crumples it up and drops it into a trash bin on the way out.

Behind him, he leaves a few bucks’ reimbursement and his bitter, unsatisfactory coffee. For anyone wiping down the tables at the end of the work day, they would have picked up the barely-drunken brew and read the Sharpied chicken scratch, reflecting momentarily on the bizarre elaborateness of such a name as is written on the cold, abandoned travel-cup.

_ Castiel Winchester _ , they would read, before disconnectedly dumping the unwanted beverage in a plastic garbage bag that probably holds the secrets of many that they will never know the stories of. People usually throw out obscure parts of themselves along with their trash, things that one could use to decipher a part of their existence just by looking at.

Such was the way with the discarded coffee; anyone who saw it wouldn’t have the context for it, but with enough of a hopeless-romantic complex (which most humans tend to have, at least deep down) maybe they would at least take a second to think about what it meant to someone, if it even meant anything at all. 

_ And though Cas hadn’t thought twice about it when telling the barista that that was his name, it still meant something to him. It meant everything. It meant family, and sacrifice, and most of all, it meant forgiveness. _

 

***

 

The hardware store across the street turns out to be pretty advantageous; sure, they have to pay the guy in the back a couple hundred dollars to make them a rosemary-salt  _ bomb _ that they assured him was for the greater good, but the benefits outweigh the detriment. 

Dean places the archaic green bottle produced from their interaction with the handyman in a bag to protect the fuse, and they exit the shop in confidence. 

“Are you sure this is going to work?”

“It did last time.” Dean bites the inside of his cheek, a gusty current ruffling through his hair as he walks on the edge of the sidewalk curb and stripping it of any remaining gel, fraying his lemon cheesecake-chocolate-milkshake locks to the four winds. 

Cas thinks of something else to say, anything, and thankfully it isn’t hard. “Have we even considered how we’re supposed to know when to use it? We haven’t drawn any lines, Dean! This is not a large town, but there could still be a hundred different pregnant women within a fifteen-mile radius that are all in danger, and unless you’re not telling me something we’re not exactly familiar with the appetite and hunting habits of Lamiae. I mean, granted, we’ve been busy…”

Dean winces.

“But now we’re all dressed up with nowhere to go!”

Dean’s phone brusquely begins twittering melodically,  _ Somebody to Love  _ by Jefferson Airplane, and he holds it up and shakes it in Cas’s face to further the irony of interruption.

However, he answers the call, and the delighted snicker on his face vanishes, thickening into horrified disbelief.

“It’s the girl,” he whispers remotely, and Cas can hear someone crying on the other line, “I told her to call me if anything else happened.” 

Cas steals the keys from Dean’s hand and waves him toward the parked Impala, climbing in the passenger’s seat and leaning over to start the engine. Incontestably, they are facing the conjuncture point.

Dean clenches the phone to his ear, holding his hand over the microphone for a second while he confronts Cas. “Man, we’re on crunch time at the Dunkirk here, and you either gotta talk or drive. And you don’t even know the significance of a steering wheel…”

“It steers.” Cas shrinks into the seat meekly. 

“Take the damn phone.” Dean says aggressively, once again shoving it in the man’s face. He buckles his seatbelt, gulps, and raises the device to his temple, pressing the speaker button.

“I’m gonna tell you what to say, and you say it.” Dean adds without taking his eyes off the road. The girl (Susan, he thinks her name was?) must’ve already given him an address, because he drives with a purpose. Castiel nods. 

On the other end of the line, Susan screams. There’s some shuffling, and Cas can tell that the phone’s been repossessed, because the next voice that hisses into it is slightly older and lower, and certainly more stoic. “Agent, please, you said you’d believe us if we knew something – unconventional – we don’t know what it is but it’s right outside, it’s got us cornered in the bathroom now and – me and my sister, we’re basically trapped-” her vocal cords give out and she yelps disjointedly, which could be contributed to either the crackling static or her manic tone, or both; and then there’s the distinct sound of fingernails scraping across wood.

“Claws,” Dean confirms placidly, with stripes of belligerence. 

“ _ Are you coming _ ?” Susan’s sister shrieks into the phone.

“Yes,” Cas answers anxiously, because the empathy is getting to him and there’s nothing else he can do but listen to Dean and propose uneducated encouragement. “Yes, we’re coming, please don’t worry. We’re on our way.”

Dean mouths at him,  _ don’t lie _ , and speaks his truth. “Okay, don’t hang up. Susan, is that you?”

“I’m her sister. I’m fifteen. I’m – my name’s Jenny.”

“Okay. Jenny. Hear me out. You got any epsom salts or somethin’ in that bathroom? Anything that contains sodium…it ain’t pure, but we’ve got to work with what we’re given here.”

“Um…yes?”

“Good,” Dean sighs in relief. “I want you to pour a line of it across the doorframe. These things, they hate salt and rosemary for some reason, and that’s about all we’ve got right now.”

“Oh…okay…” 

“You two just hang tight until we get there, okay? We’re ninety seconds away, I swear. Don't leave that bathroom and don't panic. That'll kill you.” 

His advice has the opposite impact. “No! Please don't hang up, we’re the only ones in the house, Agent, don't you dare!” 

Dean must hit the gas then, because it seems like the car goes faster. “You're gonna be fine, okay? My partner and I aren't gonna let anything happen to you. We’re gonna hang up now, and we’re close, but Jenny, listen to me – as soon as we get there and we give you a chance, you take your sister, and you get out of there, and you don't look back. You understand me?”

The girl seems more distant now, like she's holding the phone away from her when she talks. And it's more of a timid murmur, anyway. “I understand.”

Dean nods stiffly at Cas, and he hangs up the phone. 

It’s been ninety seconds twice already. 

“Dean?”

The only indication that the driver hears him is that he sits up straighter in his seat, and Cas can see that his knuckles are white on the steering wheel. 

“Cas, there's a few things you need to know.” He looks in the rearview mirror, and at the road, and back and forth between the two; anywhere but at Castiel. “We’ll make it out of this thing alive, but they might not.” 

Cas wants to rebut this, but it's a postulate of hunting he knows he can't debate. 

“Secondly, these Lamiae are nasty folk. They've got these long black claws, like I said, and they can throw you against a wall with their damn minds – and part of their evolution or something, they can never close their eyes, so it’s always gonna be watching – waiting. They’re fucking  _ monsters _ , and who knows how much shit you've been through, but this ain’t Lucifer. There ain’t no  _ plan _ , no big picture with this thing. It just wants to kill. So you get out of its way, alright? You leave the big-boy stuff to me. You’re human now, and we can't have you getting hurt.” 

Cas, again, wants wretchedly to refute this, but there’s no use. He turns to his right and stares out the polished window at the high-noon highway, disappointed and depressed, because he isn't any more than he is. No one is any more than they are, but that doesn't stop them from being a fucking baby about it, which is just another reason to be ashamed. 

He still doesn't say a word, which is his way of communicating a sort of small-scale retribution. 

“Cas, you hearing me? We only have one bomb, and I’ll be damned if I let an inexperienced…” he trails off, and Cas, in his mind, finishes the sentence with the past tense:  _ angel _ . “Use it. I just want to make sure this gets done.” He finishes, swallowing what’s probably a gob more of insensitivity. 

Cas turns toward the hunter, shaking his head slowly, with chagrin. “Dean, you know my brain didn’t melt into the fucking floorboards along with my wings, right?” 

Dean’s eyes widen, mostly because Cas almost never swears like that, and it means business. For the second time today, though, he's interposed by circumstance, and as Dean pulls up to the two-story, squat colonial, he purses his lips and prepares to burst out of the car and into the action like the damn  _ hero  _ he is. “We can talk about this later. Just…promise you'll follow my lead, and not ask too many questions.” 

Giving up entirely, and thinking it'd be just as well if he stayed in the damn car (but he doesn't), Cas agrees. 

 

***

 

They storm into the house, trying to capture as much of the Lamia’s attention as they can; because in Dean’s words, if they can “distract the dragon” they can “rescue the princesses”. This metaphor is useless, as most metaphors are, because life is not a fairytale, and rarely ends like one.

Ambushing the monster, even with professional and amateur, armed and weaponless (this is isn’t entirely honest; Cas has a silver knife that he’s been instructed to “pretend like it’s blessed” which he supposes makes sense, if he ever has to blackmail the damn thing) powers combined, what they’re heading towards won’t be an easy fight, and Cas knows it as soon as he and Dean reach the top of the stairs and there is absolute silence. 

Dean turns around from his position on the front line and glances at him worriedly, a vexed  _ I-told-you-so _ glimmering in his eyes. Cas narrows his own at him in skittish speculation, an expression that he hopes communicates back to the man,  _ shall we go on? _

Dean barely moves at all, but his response is loud and clear:  _ yes. _

Cas clings to the railing, trying not to be scared. That’s another mark of mortality: the clarity of fear in  _ everything. _

The first door they see is on the left, and it’s only slightly ajar, but their hearts jump into their throats when they open it the rest of the way.

It’s just a bedroom.

However, across the hall, there’s a slender, closed door that secretes intervals of muffled breath, and the two stalk towards it with quiet ambition. Surprisingly enough, there’s no monster anywhere, and as sketchy as it seems they can’t ignore the haze of human respiration wafting through the vestibule, singing to their moral compasses. 

Dean twirls his finger in the air, signing to Cas to turn around and watch his back – and knocking rapidly and dexterously on the door, introduces himself as a friend and a savior. “Girls, can you let me in? It’s Agent Collins. There’s no one else out here but me and my partner.”

There’s a deep intake of breath taken on the other side, and Cas recognizes the speech that follows as belonging to Jenny, the older one they gave consolation to over the phone. 

“How do I know it’s you?” 

Dean mumbles under his breath,  _ I could ask the same of you _ , but whips out his faux federal badge anyway, sliding it under the door with the toe of his shoe. “You’ve probably guessed by now that that’s not real, and my name is actually Dean Winchester, but look. Same picture, yeah? C’mon, we’re short on time here.”

Gradually, the door cracks open, exposing two young women huddled into each other on the washroom floor, sprawled over an ocean of bath salts and glossy tile. One is recognizably Susan; the other like an older, blonder version of her, hugging the quaking little one into her body. They appear to be uninjured, but they’re scarred psychologically in such a way Cas and Dean will never be able to fix. 

“You said there’s no one else in the house?” Dean assumes a nearly paternal position, with his arms crossed across his chest and his feet spread a little wider than shoulder-length apart. 

“There was our aunt, but she went to run errands.” Jenny speaks for his sister, who looks like she may not be ready to speak for a long time, long past the time they are out of this house and starting new lives. 

Which of course, they will have to do.

If Cas can recall correctly, Susan was the only kid there when her parents were killed – “everywhere”, she said – and has already seen more death than most children her age. Cas cringes.

“Yeah, I get it, it’s the middle of the afternoon. What I’m asking, is why did it go after you two? What’s been pestering you guys…isn’t the type to get involved in family affairs. It’s usually only into expectant mothers-”

Jenny averts her eyes.

“Are you…are you pregnant?” Dean cocks his head a little bit, and adjusts his footing restlessly. 

The fifteen-year old, who has maintained her serenity up until now, liberates the waterworks. Silent tears trek down her cheeks and she holds her sibling tighter, who seems unaltered by this information (Cas wonders if she’s experiencing some kind of noiseless epilepsy), and keeps her gaze on the floor in front of her. The Lamia is still nowhere to be found, which means it could be anywhere. 

“I wasn’t going to tell anyone, I don’t know how… _ it _ knows, I’m going to the clinic next week so they can – take care of it – before I even get to the second trimester. Why am I even telling you this? You haven’t earned an explanation from me, you don’t even know me…” From there on, it’s impossible to articulate what she says; it’s all too soggy, and hard to look at. Cas doesn’t know how he does it, but Dean crouches down and leans in to comfort her. 

“Hey. I’m not gonna ask you any questions. Your life is your life, but I’m glad you told me because now we know why it’s after you and that you’ll be out of danger very soon, if not within the next few hours while me and him work the job here. Remember what I told you, about getting out of here?”

She sobers up and sniffles into the sleeve of her hoodie, nodding at him.

“Wonderful – that’s good. Do you have a fire escape on this floor that leads directly outside?”

She nods again, fight-or-flight mode taking over as she gathers Susan in her arms and stands up all wobbly, like a spring fawn. Cas wishes they could stay with her for longer, make sure she gets somewhere safe, make sure she finds a home.

“Okay. You and Susan had better leave now if you want to do it alive.” He looks right into her, stepping aside to clear the doorframe, his face reflecting as much grim will as is possible to fit within a person. 

The two of them hurry out, substituting for a thank-you with a faithful glimpse in Dean’s direction. As soon as they’re out of the way, and the house is vacant save the pair of hunters, there’s a reptilian voice that rings clear into the approaching evening behind them. Instinctively, they both turn around on impact, holding up guns and knives, the explosive cocktail stashed in Dean’s inner pocket where it will hopefully remain intact until the time is ripe. 

“There you are.” Dean chuckles hatefully. “We’ve been waiting. You’re late.”

The Lamia slinks towards them until it’s a casual conversation distance away. It resembles a malicious version of the little mermaid, with a few other alterations. Its hair is long and black, and swishes around its powdery face like greasy seaweed. Its upper body is bare and pudgy, with an abundance of flesh that looks pasty and sickly; but at its waist it becomes the monster, with oleaginous, putrid-green scales sheathing its extremities in primordial armor. It looks old and a little Victorian and dangerous, with a thin forked ribbon of tongue and watery black beads for eyes. Its lips are also coveted by the chalky dust that inhibits its skin, and it clouds in front of its mouth when she talks. 

“Well, then,” she simpers, “You have stolen my meal.”

“We didn’t steal anything from you,” Cas says, and it’s the first thing he’s said since the Impala, “if anything, you’re the thief. Innocent lives are being burglarized here, helpless people who don’t wish to be…cannibalized…by things such as yourself.”

She frowns and puckers in facetious dubiousness. “I’d hardly call it cannibalization. I am my species, you humans are yours, and we vie for the top of the food chain – but that goes without saying. Besides, if we’ve decided we’re not going to play nice here then I’ll say it; you’re one to preach about helplessness, Castiel.”

Dean starts towards her. “I hate it when you  _ monsters _ ,” he snarls, “turn out to be sarcastic little sons of bitches. You leave him alone!” 

Cas extends an arm to restrain him; Dean looks at it and pushes it down, but holds his ground where he is.

“Dean, Dean, Dean…where do I even start with you? You’re wallowing constantly in self-pity; you hate your poetically valiant lifestyle, and yet you go on; you see the world in black and white, evil and for-the-most-part-benevolent. Not to mention you’re completely justified in despising yourself, and you know it; and you’re hopelessly devoted to your best friend in the trenchcoat here, who you haven’t told since you fell for him eight years ago due to your pride, acute homophobia, and inferiority complex. So tell me Dean, what do  _ you  _ have to defend? What do you have to keep fighting for? You could just let me go here, and I could do the same for you, and we could both go on trying to fill ourselves with pastimes because we know that we’ll inevitably be killed by either our predators or our prey. Alternatively, we could do this the hard way, and I could slam your precious Cas up against the plaster here and tell him  _ everything _ while you watch. Hopefully he won’t die of shock, or worse, a broken heart,” she pouts, “before I get the chance to slit his throat.” She holds up a slick, pitchy talon, and grins sadistically.

Dean gapes at her, and Cas doesn’t have time to seize the moment’s opportunity to bring him back to the present and its problems, because the Lamia throws him against the wall with a flick of her fingernail. He can’t move.

“No!” Dean whimpers, before the monster gestures towards him and his jaw snaps shut with incredible telepathic force.

Cas guesses that Dean is frozen where he is as well, but he can’t even afford to make eye contact with the man because the Lamia glissades towards him, dirty claws outstretched and reaching for his sternum. He sucks in his stomach and waits for it to happen, for it to all fade into darkness, but instead she merely hums moistly into his ear, like she said she would. 

“You know, Castiel, I have already sifted through both of your brains, and you’re both useless, but I have a thing for seeing people’s faces. And I thought I should tell you – when you were with that djinn…what was her name…Rose? Well, you’re wrong about her and what she did to you. You didn’t wish to be with Dean. It’s not that simple, it never is. You wished for Dean to be happy, and something inside you knew somehow that it would be with you, living a nice domestic life somewhere in the suburbs like the perfect rom-com couple. And as for the Winchester himself-” she whispers to him, “he killed that poor creature not because it was a monster, although that’s what he would’ve done anyway – he killed it because she told him what was going on in your head, and he was scared. He was _frightened to pieces_ of what the two of you have. He still is. Now, isn’t that sweet?” 

She’s right, of course, about everything, and Cas feels stupid for ever thinking the opposite on any of it. Impulsively, he gives her the reaction she asked for, molding his face into disheartened appalment. As the Lamia absorbs it greedily, he spots Dean creeping up behind her, the lit fuse of the Molotov in his hand. It’s that instant that Cas smiles, because Dean is saving him again. It’s that instant that Dean chooses to throw the thing, pulverizing the explosion in the mutant’s long and flammable seaweed hair, lighting it on fire and burning the monster to nothing. It’s that instant, before the nothing, that the barbarian takes advantage of, crashing through Cas’s lungs and into his cardiovascular cavity, shredding his body from his collarbones to the pit of his abdomen.

Castiel watches his offender wither into an ashy cracker as he sputters blood. When she is gone, evanesced into the air, and there is no longer a fence between him and his man, he hears a stuffy screech that ripples around him in waves of sound.

Dying feels to him like rain on a raging fire; steadily extinguishing something that should’ve been gone long ago.

With all of his organs hanging out of his body it’s difficult to hang on, but he does because Dean needs him. He can hear him wailing like he’s underwater, stifled and lagging a little bit, like slow audio on a YouTube video. But, he can hear him nonetheless, and his words are less than reassuring, mostly because they’re impossible.

“Cas, it’s okay, buddy, you’re gonna make it, you’re not gonna die like this. We’re gonna get you to a hospital, and you’ll be good as new as soon as tomorrow – you’ll be walking and talking like it never happened, we’ll get you all fixed up, don’t you worry, don’t you worry,” Dean cradles Cas’s ragdoll body, covering himself with blood, kissing his forehead and pulling him in closer every time he shudders with hysteria. “Cas, baby, I’m so sorry…please forgive me, Cas, I’m so sorry…”

Cas opens his mouth to answer, to say that he already has, but his eyes are way ahead of him. They close, and he goes limp, and for him there is silence.

 

***

 

_ EPILOGUE _

 

 

You raise your glass to your lips. 

Your brother doesn’t cry in front of you anymore, not since he brought Cas home. You remember them both being painted red; you remember the muscles in your metacarpals slackening completely and dropping your book to the floor. You can recall taking what was left of Castiel from Dean, and Dean dropping to his knees, still holding his arms out as if his arms were still holding Cas. After that, it’s fuzzy; you drove to the hospital, and an ambulance met you halfway there, but there was nothing they could do. He’d been gone for a while, hours, even; and at that point, a paramedic explained, there was never anything ( _they_ ) could do.

But you and Dean are different; you know things they don’t know; have seen things they’d be lucky enough to never lay eyes on. You brought up a few times the options you had, of demon-deals and rituals and even going after God, but everything you said got the same response, whether it was a few words that seldom varied or a subtle shake of the older man’s head. At least, they all meant the same thing, and you didn’t always understand, but in those cases you’d ritualistically return to the bottom line of it all:  _ there’s nothing we can do, Sammy, just leave it alone. _

Today you make the finalized decision of giving up said options. Today is Cas’s memorial, and today you stay strong for your brother, even though you feel empty, like all you are is a swaying pillar of dust in the wind.

Even though today marks that you have no one left.

Dean insisted on a hunter’s funeral, saying that Cas would’ve wanted it, and he’s right. You had to be the one to ignite the shrouded pyre, because Dean’s been on a bender for the last week and he’s not about to stop drinking  _ now _ . He’s been curing his hangovers with more alcohol, and you’re worried for him. You know what you’re doing now –  watching the white sheet go up in smoke and taking your collective best friend with it – isn’t going to help either of you, but it provides achingly melancholy closure that you suppose the both of you might need. 

You shift your weight on the acrid grey-green grass underneath you, and watch Dean. Your brother takes a swig and sets his liquor down, standing up to pay his respects. You can see now that you were wrong; he  _ has _ cried in front of you since that tortuous night, because he does it now. He’s quiet, but the tear tracks on his face and his trembling lower lip give it away. You know what he’s thinking; if inebriation can’t lessen the anger and the pain and the guilty terror that he feels, then nothing can, except death, and that’s out of the question.

You know, however, that if anything could kill him, it’d be this.

Seeing Dean so volatile nearly kills  _ you _ , and you can’t pretend they’re aren’t tears on  _ your _ face, so you let them scrape down the bridge of your nose like they’re carving Cas’s name into your expression.

“I did this, you know.” You whip around from your religious concentration on the bonfire, spooked by the unorthodox speech like an animal, your hair drifting into your eyes as you hone in again on your marred and only family.

You can do nothing but keep your eyes on his, because arguing with him will be futile, especially when you know he’s not wrong.

“If you trace it back, it’s all me. I brought him in there, I’m why he died a human, I was so stupid as to think that he’d be okay with me around…nothing is, Sammy…” He mourns like a drunk, and even despite the fermenting bubble of somber apoplexy that surrounds you and your entire lives, now, claustrophobically, you pull your brother into a skintight embrace. The impact brings him to eruption, but all in all you’re grateful; it’s been so long since you’ve been able to help him.

“He died because he loved me,” Dean sobs into your shoulder, and you bring him in closer. It’s like carrying a rapidly thawing block of ice – he is liquefying between your arms, dissolving into the parched dirt underneath you, right in front of you. Just as Castiel vaporizes into the sky, Dean rains into the ground; clammy and stormy and saturated with misery.  

“I know,” You cling to him and he clings to you, because you’re each all the other has left. “I know.”

You don’t ask him if he felt the same, or if he still does, because that’s another thing you have already distinguished; so, you content yourself to staying there for a while. You both do, and you pray to whatever’s out there that somewhere, Cas is watching – and that he knows, too.

You let Dean sluggishly grind to an unmitigated lack of energy, and the vigilant stillness in his limbs communicates what his lips don’t have to:

_ Yeah, Sammy, I loved him too. _

 

 

 

 

_ END. _

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> here's the thing...I wrote this before the season twelve finale. How handy that their ending corresponds with mine...  
> RIP Castiel, and RIP his boyfriend's heart. Amen.  
> I hope this wasn't too painful, or at the very least the beauty of it cancels some of it out. Thank you so much for coming thus far! I loved writing this, even though sometimes it was a bitch and I had tears blanketing my face, but this fic has become my child. I hope y'all had fun playing with it.


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